


Let Your Honesty Shine

by elrhiarhodan



Category: The Normal Heart (2014), White Collar
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Crossover, Emotional Trauma, F/M, Families of Choice, Friendship, Future Fic, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mourning, Multi, Neal as Artist, OT3, Post-Anklet, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-08
Updated: 2014-10-08
Packaged: 2018-02-20 09:40:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2424020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elrhiarhodan/pseuds/elrhiarhodan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a hot June day, one summer in the near future, Ned Weeks finds himself in a West Village coffee shop. When he overhears a fascinating conversation about blackmail, kidnapping and getting shot at, he has to take a look. One of the speakers is definitely a Fed – Ned can tell just by the haircut and the ugly suit. The other man is his lover, Felix. Except that Felix has been dead for thirty years.</p><p><b>Warnings/Enticements/Triggers:</b> Canon death of canon character (Felix Turner), death of a non-canon White Collar character. Mild public expression of homophobia, self-deprecating use of homophobic slurs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let Your Honesty Shine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kanarek13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanarek13/gifts), [wickhouse2005](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wickhouse2005/gifts).



> Ned Weeks is – as a matter of public record – a fictional stand-in for Larry Kramer, author, screenwriter, playwright, AIDS and human rights activist. The Normal Heart is intensely biographical, as is the sequel, The Destiny of Me. However, much of the character of the older Ned Weeks, as portrayed in this story, has been informed by the public persona of Larry Kramer, and I’ve used certain events in Larry Kramer’s life as if they’d happened to Ned. 
> 
> I have tried to be true to the character of Ned Weeks and be respectful of his creator.
> 
> The title of this story is taken from the lyrics to Simon and Garfunkel’s song, “The Only Living Boy in New York,” which was used in the closing scene of the HBO production of The Normal Heart.
> 
> Please don't forget to leave feedback for the incredible artwork at [Kanarek13's LiveJournal](http://kanarek13.livejournal.com/43710.html)

  
  


  
  


__________________

  
  
  
  
Once upon a time, Ned Weeks had been a famously angry man. Once upon a time, he had a lot to be angry about.  
  
He still did.  
  
But he’d mellowed, worn down by time, progress, age, and loneliness. Mostly by loneliness. The disease had mellowed him, too. He was over seventy-five, which even now seemed like an impossible achievement. At fifty, he hadn’t thought he’d live to see fifty-five, and when he made it to that advanced age, he had strongly doubted he’d see sixty. The news magazines published his obituary when he was sixty-four. They were, quite thankfully and quite obviously, wrong. He was still here, and if he wasn’t throwing brickbats at the establishment so frequently anymore, he could still toss an occasional fast one and brush people back from their complacency.  
  
But today wasn’t the day for shouting anyone down, for making his point with big gestures and bigger words. Today, he was tired and not feeling all that great, and despite the promises he’d made, he really didn’t want to attend the massive circus that was Gay Pride Week in New York City. Hell, being gay was practically an industry in New York these days, not so different from law or finance or insurance. Everywhere he looked, he saw pretty people doing pretty things to each other, wearing the rainbow like a fashion statement instead of a political one.  
  
It was only Wednesday, but the route for Sunday’s annual march already looked like a rainbow had vomited on lower Manhattan. Frankly, if Ned was a praying sort of man, he’d pray for some intense tropical storm to drop a few feet of water on Christopher Street, if just to send all those annoyingly beautiful tourists back to their overpriced hotel rooms. He probably shouldn’t have ventured out of his apartment, but he needed to show his face at a few meetings, he needed to harangue a bunch of morons, and worst of all; he needed to actually be nice to some people.  
  
Tasks completed, but not yet ready to go back to his splendid solitude, Ned wandered into a quiet coffee shop on Barrow Street. Of course, it wasn’t completely quiet. There were a few twinks in strategically torn rainbow tie-dye at the counter, loudly gushing about the goings-on at their favorite nightspot (who fucked who on the dance floor, probably). In a booth, a pair of dykes were holding hands and talking intently. Ned figured, with typical sourness, that they were arguing about who was going to wear the strap-on that night.  
  
The only waitress in the place, a woman who looked as old as Ned felt, told him to take a seat anywhere he wanted.  
  
Even though it was the first day of summer according to the calendar, and clearly felt like it, he ordered a cup of hot tea. He was old and sick and the simple pleasure of Lipton’s would make him feel better. The woman came back with his tea, and the water was barely lukewarm. Ned decided not to bitch about it; some battles weren’t that important.  
  
The coffee shop was dimly lit, as if to compensate for the inadequacy of the air conditioning. Ned’s eyes adjusted to the light (or the lack thereof) and he flipped open a copy of the Daily News that someone had left behind. The rag was barely worth the paper it was printed on, but it _was_ better than the Post.  
  
There were the inevitable glowing articles about Bill DeBlasio and family, now well into the second year of his term, not that he really cared. Though, if pressed, he’d have to admit that he had voted for the man. A fake socialist as mayor was certainly better than a real conservative.  
  
Ned was distracted from the so-called news when the coffee shop door opened, flooding the place with too-bright sunlight. He could only make out the silhouettes of two men, but their attire and voices distinctly placed them as professional New Yorkers, although there was a very slight twang to the smaller man’s voice that betrayed a Midwestern origin.  
  
He turned his attention back to the newspaper and his tepid tea, still unwilling to return to the air conditioned solitude of his apartment. If he wasn’t so damn ill all the time, he’d get a dog. He missed having a dog, because at least a dog wouldn’t look at him and think he was too damaged, too old, too Jewish.  
  
The two men took up occupancy at the table next to his, their conversation annoyingly audible.  
  


_“Come on, be honest with me. You miss it, don’t you?”_

_“Seriously? That’s what you needed to ask me? That’s why I came all the way downtown in the middle of the day? It couldn’t have waited until tonight?”_

_“Actually, no, it couldn’t. I’ve managed to open up a slot in my budget, which I have to submit by the end of the day, and you’d fit in nicely.”_

_“Peter, you’ve got to be kidding me. I’m just a slot in your budget?”_

_“You’re a hell of a lot more than that, Neal, and you know it. But come on, be honest – you still miss it. It’s not like I can’t tell. I’ve seen you sneaking glances at my case files.”_

_“All right, okay, yeah, I do. I miss it, just a little. Are you satisfied?”_

_“Your desk is still there. You could come back, you know. Any time, just say the word.”_

_“For what, a locality-adjusted GS-9 salary, paid vacation and health care?”_

_“Don’t knock the health care – you’re not getting any younger. And besides, how exciting can art authentication be?”_

_“It’s exciting enough. I don’t get shot at or kidnapped anymore, and no one’s tried to kill me or blackmail me in the last six months. That’s a benefit worth paying for.”_

  
  
What the ever-loving fuck? _Shot at? Kidnapped?_ This might be the most fascinating conversation Ned had ever overheard in a coffee shop. Given the laughter in the men’s voices, the affection, he wondered if they were joking. Ned had to turn and sneak a peek.  
  
He did and the first thought that crossed his mind was, _so I must have died this morning and no one told me._  
  
Felix was sitting at the table next to him, smiling at a man who wasn’t him, who would never be him. Be-suited and broad shouldered, with a face that screamed WASP, the man smiled back at Felix, and Ned couldn’t hear their words over the pounding of his heart and the buzzing in his ears.  
  
He didn’t even realize he had stood up until his chair clattered to the floor. The two men looked over and Felix got up and righted the chair. He had such worry in his eyes. Felix shouldn’t be worrying about him. But he was also looking at him like he was a stranger. Ned couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe.  
  
“Sir, are you okay?”  
  
He must have said something, or tried to, because Felix – _Felix_ – put a hand on his arm and tried to get him to sit down.  
  
“Peter – maybe we should call 9-1-1, this guy doesn’t look so good.”  
  
No, he wasn’t dead. This man, who looked so much like his partner, wasn’t Felix after all. The resemblance was more than superficial, but there were differences. His voice was wrong. The color of his eyes didn’t match the blue in his memory. The suit and tie and polished smile were all wrong. Worst of all, he was older than Felix would ever be.  
  
Ned threw off that helping hand and though it was altogether unreasonable, he felt as angry as he had in 1981, when his friends started dying and no one seemed to give a shit. “Who the fuck are you?”  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“I said, who the _fuck_ are you?” _And why do you so much look like the man I’ve never stopped loving for one second in the past thirty years?_  
  
Not-Felix’s companion stood up, but he seemed more concerned than angry, and he pushed Not-Felix aside. “You don’t look too good, is there someone I can call for you?”  
  
Ned closed his eyes and the riptide of memory threatened to pull him out to sea. _“I was married. I have a son.”_  
  
He opened his eyes and really looked at Not-Felix. Yes, this man was just the right age – mid-to-late thirties. Ned reached out and grabbed his arm. “Your father, is your father’s name Felix Turner?”  
  


  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
Peter watched Neal shut down. There was little that could kill Neal’s smile. Even when he was angry or frightened, Neal could summon a convincing grin. But mention his father, and Neal’s face turned hard and angry.  
  
“No, my father is James Bennett. Or maybe _was_ James Bennett. The bastard could be dead for all I know.”  
  
The old man, though, wasn’t put off and wouldn’t let the matter go. “No, you’re Felix Turner’s son. You have to be. You look just like him.”  
  
Neal shook off the man’s grip and stepped back. “I don’t know you, I don’t know Felix Turner. Regardless of whom you think I might look like, my father’s name is James Bennett.”  
  
“Are you certain?”  
  
Peter had to give the old man credit for persistence.  
  
Neal wasn’t backing down, either. “Yes, unfortunately, I am. There’s even a DNA test that proves it.” Neal’s tone was clipped, resentment and anger pungent in every syllable. He turned to Peter. “I’ve got an appointment uptown and I’m going to be late. Will I see you tonight?”  
  
Peter nodded, understanding Neal’s need to escape. “Of course.”  
  
Neal spared a glance at the old man, who seemed more sorrowful than angry now, then looked back at Peter. “Can’t wait.” He then gave Peter the surprise of his life as he pressed a hungry kiss on his mouth, his tongue hot and invasive, not allowing any quarter. They rarely indulged in public displays of affection, even though it was a year since Neal had been off the tracking anklet and they’d finally given physical definition to the love that had been there all along.  
  
Peter couldn’t help but respond to the kiss. He was human and there was little need for discretion in this hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in the West Village. He threaded his fingers through the dark silk of Neal’s hair and kissed him back, not caring that his lover’s amorous display was intended to shock the old man.  
  
A minute - or maybe an hour - later, Neal broke their kiss with a nip on Peter’s lower lip and a stage-whispered order. “See you tonight, lover." At that, Neal left Peter standing there, aroused and bemused. Light and heat momentarily blinded him as Neal opened the coffee shop door and walked away.  
  
Peter sighed. He really did need to get back to the office, where there was the budget report to submit (without a slot for Neal), plus stacks of staffing requisitions and performance reviews to deal with. Bureaucratic matters that were a hell of a lot less intriguing than the mystery this old man had just handed him.  
  
“If your _friend_ was trying to shock me, he’s got a long way to go. I’ve taken part in orgies that would have put Caligula to shame.”  
  
Peter turned his attention back to the old man, who thankfully looked a little less like a walking corpse. Rather than loom over him, Peter sat down. “Neal doesn’t normally act like such a dick. He has very few vulnerabilities, but somehow, you managed to hit his biggest one – his father.”  
  
“You know his father?”  
  
“To my regret, yes, I’ve met James Bennett.”  
  
“Does he look a lot like your … friend?”  
  
Peter didn’t really have to consider the question, given how “Sam” had played him and Neal for several weeks, how neither of them had any clue that Sam was actually James until Diana handed him that report. “There’s a certain resemblance around the eyes, but I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup as Neal’s father if you held a gun to my head.”  
  
“And what about this man? Couldn’t he have been your friend’s father?” The guy took out his wallet and removed a well-worn photograph. Peter looked at it and blinked. There were two men in the picture – one might have been the man sitting across from him, maybe thirty years ago. The other man was Neal. Or his doppelgänger.  
  
He turned the photo over and there was something written on the back – _Ned and Felix, Montauk, 1981. “May you always be this happy, Tommy.”_  
  
“You’re Ned?”  
  
The old man nodded. “Yes, Ned Weeks.”  
  
_Ah, that explained some things._ Peter knew just who Ned Weeks was; there were few New Yorkers of a certain age who didn’t. But the story of Ned Weeks, gay rights and AIDS activist, was a lot less relevant than the mystery in this photograph. “The man with you is Felix Turner? The man you think could be Neal’s father?”  
  
Ned was blunt. “He _was_ Felix Turner. Felix has been dead a very long time.”  
  
“I’m sorry.” Peter could hear the ache of loss in that simple statement.  
  
“Thank you.” Ned gave a sad sigh. “Felix had a son – I never met him, and Felix only mentioned him once. He said he never saw him and he didn’t fight for visitation rights because he was gay. He thought it would be a foregone conclusion that he’d be denied. His son would be your friend’s age by now.”  
  
“You don’t know the child’s name? His mother’s name?”  
  
Ned shook his head. “No, I don’t. Other … things got in the way and we never talked about it. Then it was too late.”  
  
Peter kept staring at the photograph. The man who could have been Neal appeared to be a hell of a lot younger – in more than just years. He looked a lot more carefree, a lot more innocent. This wasn’t a man who had spent four years in a prison cell. This wasn’t a man who had his life ripped away again and again. But this man probably didn’t live to be as old as Neal was now.  
  
“Don’t you want to know what happened to him?” Ned stuck his jaw out like an aging pugilist.  
  
“I think I can guess,” Peter replied with deliberate gentleness.  
  
The fight went out of the old man and he seemed to collapse in on himself. “Felix died of the plague in 1983, a year before you could even get tested for HIV.”  
  
Again, Peter said, “I’m sorry.” And again, the words seemed so inadequate in the face of the man’s still-fresh grief.  
  
“Thanks.” Ned rested his head in his hands. “I guess this is just one of those freak things – two people who are completely unrelated look exactly alike. It really doesn’t matter, though. If your friend – if Neal’s – father had a DNA test done to prove paternity, then his resemblance to Felix is just an accident. They do say that everyone has a twin somewhere.”  
  
Peter wasn’t ready to surrender this mystery. “Would you mind if I took a picture of this?”  
  
“If you’d like.” Ned shrugged, but Peter could tell that his indifference was only a mask.  
  
He set the picture on a clean napkin, focused the camera on his smartphone and took several shots for good measure, and repeated the process with the message on the back, before handing the precious picture back to Ned.  
  
“Who was Tommy?”  
  
Ned smiled. “Tommy Boatwright, the gentlest and most relentless soul you’d ever have met. I think he would have gotten a good laugh out of this whole situation. Or wept until his heart broke. He’s dead now, too.” Ned didn’t say anything else as he returned the photo to his wallet and they sat there, the silence awkward. Peter wondered if he should help the man get home. He was – despite his still formidable temper – obviously frail.  
  
“You’re married.” The old man reached out and touched Peter’s wedding band.  
  
“Yes.” Peter stifled a sigh. He didn’t want or need to explain his unusual relationship with Neal and with El to a stranger.  
  
“But not to Neal. He wasn’t wearing a ring.”  
  
Remembering the adage about how truth, no matter how difficult, was still easier than a lie, Peter kept the explanation simple. “No, Neal’s not my husband.”  
  
Ned opened his mouth and Peter could all but hear the harangue begin.  
  
“And my wife has welcomed him into our lives with an open heart and open arms. There’s a universe of difference between promiscuity and polyamory, so whatever you're going to say, save it.”  
  
Ned shut his mouth with a snap and chuckled. “You really do know who I am.”  
  
“Yeah. I was in grad school at Harvard in 1988 and attended the first ACT UP rally held there. I heard you give one of your hellfire and brimstone speeches and it scared the shit out of me.”  
  
“Good, it was supposed to.”  
  
This time, the silence was comfortable, but it was getting late and there was something Peter needed to check. He got up. “Can I have a telephone number? To reach you if I find out something.”  
  
Ned gave him an odd, almost hopeful look. “You really think there’s anything to this?”  
  
It was Peter’s turn to shrug. “I don’t know, but there could be. It’s an interesting puzzle and I’d like to try to solve it.”  
  
“Well, since you know who I am, you’ll know where to find me.”  
  
Peter shook his head, “That’s sort of a leap, wouldn’t you say?”  
  
“Don’t screw with me. The FBI probably has a file on me that’s a foot thick. And you’re one of them – I can see your badge. And I also overheard your discussion with Neal, which was fascinating, by the way.”  
  
Peter gritted his teeth. This conversation was sort of like talking with a very angry and rather charmless version of Mozzie.  
  
Ned then relented and gave Peter an email address and a cellphone number. “I’m doing this more out of a sense of morbid curiosity than anything. I also want to know about the kidnappings, the blackmail and the murder attempts.”  
  
Peter laughed. He had to. “Maybe someday you will.” He gave Ned one of his cards and changed the subject. “Should I get a cab for you? It’s brutal out and I don’t think you should be walking around in this heat.”  
  
Ned looked like he was about to argue, but thought better of it. “My apartment’s not that far, but I’d appreciate that. Thank you.”  
  
Neal’s uncanny ability to hail a cab seemed to have rubbed off on Peter, at least for this moment. Outside, in the sweltering heat, he held out his hand just as one of the new minivan-type vehicles cruised down Barrow Street. To his delight, it pulled up. He helped Ned into it and watched as it pulled away from the curb and disappeared into the shimmering haze.  
  
By the time he’d made it back to the office – using his own shoe leather – Peter had sweated through his suit jacket. An overcooked noodle had more life than he did at the moment.  
  
As he passed by, Diana looked up from her work. “You okay, boss?”  
  
Peter glared at her. The relaxed dress code of the modern FBI meant that female agents had a lot more leeway with work-appropriate attire. Diana was wearing a sleeveless tunic and loose fitting trousers. He was stuck in a dress shirt, a damned tie and a jacket. He refrained from telling one of his favorite agents how much he hated her and simply grunted an “I’m okay,” before heading up to his office.  
  
It was close to four on a Wednesday afternoon, and he couldn’t bring himself to care as he dumped his jacket, ripped the tie off, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. At least the office was air conditioned and he slowly felt himself cooling off. He must be getting old because it was only a few dozen blocks from Barrow Street to the office, but it seemed like he’d just walked the length of Manhattan.  
  
And that brought him back to thoughts of his bizarre encounter with Ned Weeks. Before doing anything, he wanted to check on Neal. Contrary to his claim, Peter knew that there was no appointment uptown, unless it was with a glass of lightly chilled Chardonnay and a plate of prosciutto-wrapped melon on the terrace.  
  
He pulled out his phone and sent a text. _You okay?_  
  
Neal replied almost immediately. _Yeah, fine._  
  
_You sure?_  
  
_I'm fine. Don’t want to talk about it. See you tonight?_  
  
_Yes, probably around 7. Need to pick up Satch. Can’t wait._  
  
_Neither can I._  
  
Peter pocketed his phone, fished out his keys, and unlocked the bottom desk drawer. Behind the small gun safe was a file. It contained nothing of earth-shattering importance, just small bits and pieces of information relating to Neal. Copies of his original (and only) conviction, his contract with the FBI and all the amendments, the letter from the Commutation Board after the treasure had been recovered, the notice, two years later, from the Bureau of Prisons and the Justice Department that Neal’s sentence had been commuted (the original was framed and on display at his house). And most relevant right now, the DNA report for one Sam Phelps, also known as James Bennett.  
  
Peter had scanned the report when Diana handed it to him. He had been desperately worried about Neal and his reactions, and hadn’t taken the time to do more than glance at the actual particulars of the document. That night, he’d rushed over to Neal’s apartment; intent on comforting his friend and confronting the man who’d played them both like a violin. The shit had rolled downhill quickly from there. Sam – no, James – had given them a plausible explanation for his disappearance and reappearance in Neal’s life, and Peter hadn’t gone back and read beyond the cover page of the report.  
  
When Reese had been pushed out and Calloway made her entrance, Peter tucked the report into his “Neal” file and locked it away for safe keeping, never having the need to look at it again. He did now, and the information was surprising, to say the least.  
  


  
  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
Sitting in front of his easel, he attempted to execute a half sized reproduction of “An Old Man in Red”. Why he picked this painting to copy was glaringly obvious – there was something about the sadness in the eyes of the man he’d met at the coffee shop, the wary tilt to his head that called this piece to mind.  
  
His laptop was opened and a reference image was on the screen, but Neal didn’t really need it. He’d seen the original in the Hermitage, and it was fixed in his memory. In truth, Neal was tempted to shut down the computer, if to avoid the temptation to do a search for that name.  
  
_Felix Turner_  
  
He painted but the thoughts kept chasing around his head. Turner wasn’t all that uncommon a name. Hell, the last woman he’d had a serious relationship with – the last woman who tried to kill him – was named Turner. But Felix wasn’t exactly a common name. How many could there be?  
  
Neal kept a firm grip on his paintbrush and did his damnedest to ignore the computer and the temptation it represented. Except that he’d never been all that good at ignoring temptation.  
  
He put down his brush and palette and turned to the computer. But before he could call up a search page, he unceremoniously pressed the power button, listened to the drive spin down, closed the screen and took the thing over to the fireplace and stashed it in one of the compartments in the mantle. Not that that was really getting rid of temptation. He still had his cell phones, plus an iPad. But those weren’t sitting out and staring him in the face.  
  
Task accomplished and feeling a little less disconcerted, Neal returned to his easel and tried to let the art overtake him. The face on the canvas began to take shape, but the sounds of the paintbrush against the taut fabric didn’t do much to drown out the old man’s words. _“Your father, was your father’s name Felix Turner?”_  
  
At that moment, Neal wished like hell he could have said yes, his father was Felix Turner because being a stranger’s son was a lot better than being a murderer’s. It wasn’t until he’d stalked out of the coffee shop that he considered the ramifications – that ‘Felix Turner’ was an alias that James had used – like Sam Phelps.  
  
But somehow, that didn’t feel right. The urgency in the old man’s eyes, the intensity of his words, the sense of grief in the very question didn’t match with the idea that James had once been this man, this Felix. Not back then, not when he was a child, or even before.  
  
He kept working and kept trying not to think about it, about why a random stranger would ask about his paternity. Eventually, Neal was able to lose himself in the painting. The small air conditioning unit that June had installed for the apartment a few years ago clicked on and off as the temperature rose and fell, but Neal didn’t notice. The light shifted, and even though there was still sunshine pouring through the French doors and the skylights, the shadows in the room began to lengthen and Neal blinked. He looked at his cell phone; it was almost six-thirty. Peter would be here soon.  
  
Neal got a whiff of himself and grimaced. He needed a shower.  
  
Not that Peter would mind his stink. Peter actually liked his stink and often said so. He said he liked knowing that Neal was a real human being, not some perfect mythological creature who didn’t sweat or fart or burp.  
  
But Neal minded, and he minded that he minded. He tried to tell himself that he didn’t have to be perfect for Peter and Elizabeth (well, mostly for Peter). But he wanted to be perfect, anyway.  
  
Which was foolish. After all, they’d seen him at his worst: drunk and drugged, grieving and angry, depressed and distraught, charming and cunning and all of the other shades of Neal Caffrey, con man. But for some reason, now that their relationship had evolved into something that still had the power to stop him in his tracks, he didn’t want Peter finding him messy and sweaty, with paint under fingernails and stale coffee breath.  
  
Time wasn’t going to wait and Peter was a man who believed in promptness. If he said he’d be here at seven, he would be here at seven, no excuses. Neal pulled fresh clothes from the wardrobe and headed for the shower, not bothering to cover up his work in progress. Peter would see it and know just what he was doing. They probably wouldn’t talk about it, at least not right away. But they would get to it, eventually. Even though they’d both learned harsh lessons about not communicating, Peter knew when not to push.  
  
By the time he had showered and shaved and dressed and came back into the apartment, Peter was already there. He had clearly helped himself to one of the bottles of beer Neal kept stocked in the fridge.  
  
Satchmo looked up from the dog bed Neal had gotten when Peter started staying over a few nights a week and gave him a welcoming ‘woof’. Peter, with a smile, greeted him with his own, “Woof.”  
  
“Woof back.” Neal walked over to Peter and kissed him. It was a kiss leagues different from the one he’d given him in the coffee shop. He’d been angry, flustered and needed to do something outrageous. Except he’d been too freaked out, then too aroused, to wait to see if he’d succeeded.  
  
This kiss was gentle and a bit tentative and when Peter touched his cheek, Neal just wanted to melt into his arms.  
  
Peter broke the kiss, his lips smiling, his eyes glowing, his hands resting on Neal's hips and holding him close. “Hey there. Happy Wednesday.”  
  
Neal felt a little goofy, a little giddy, and thoroughly in love. Whatever unease he had felt from the strange encounter with the old man disappeared as if it had never happened. He was probably grinning like a fool because his cheeks hurt. “Hey, happy Wednesday.”  
  
They might have stood there until the sun set, but Peter’s phone rang. It was Elizabeth; Neal knew who it was by the ringtone, “Pretty Woman,” because he’d programmed it into Peter’s phone a few months ago.  
  
He went over to Satchmo and listened to the conversation with half an ear, concentrating more on giving the dog a belly rub. As silly as it seemed, Neal cherished the fact that Peter brought him over when he stayed here on the nights that El was in D.C. The dog wasn’t so young anymore, but was well trained and accustomed to being on his own for lengths of time. Peter could have left Satch with the neighbors (as he’d done many times before) or insisted that Neal come to Brooklyn, which he would have been more than happy to do. But Neal loved having Satchmo here, in his apartment. If asked to explain why it mattered to him, he probably couldn’t.  
  
The dog rolled onto his back. He rumbled and whined with pleasure as Neal found that sweet spot where his belly and ribcage met. He was so involved with pleasing Satchmo that he didn’t hear Peter say good night to El and end the call.  
  
“You know, Neal, you’ve corrupted my dog.”  
  
Neal looked up. “Huh?”  
  
“He’s no longer satisfied with just getting his ears scratched when I come home. He wants the full Caffrey treatment. Every night.” Peter waved his hand at the highly indecorous pose the Labrador had assumed – on his back, legs sprawled, belly displayed, tongue lolling in an undignified but very happy pant. “I say ‘let’s go see Neal’ and he all but fetches his own leash and my car keys.”  
  
“Ah, he just likes the attention.” Neal shifted into a sitting position on the floor; his knees weren’t so young anymore. Satchmo took advantage and rolled into Neal’s lap.  
  
“See what I mean? You’ve started something you’re not going to be able to stop.”  
  
“I’d apologize, if I could figure out what to be sorry for.”  
  
“Oh, when your legs fall asleep and you can’t move and you need me to help you get up, then you’ll figure it out.”  
  
Neal laughed, his happiness rising like a rainbow-colored soap bubble, but a lot less ephemeral. “It’s worth it.”  
  
Peter looked down at him, smiling. “Yeah, I guess it is.”  
  
He continued to service Satchmo’s doggy need for affection and Peter ended up on the couch with the Yankees-Angels game on at a low volume while he worked through some case files. Neal squelched his curiosity. There had been a lot of truth in his admission this afternoon. He _did_ miss working with the FBI, and not just with Peter. He missed the challenges and the opportunity to do something that really mattered. Of course, he’d never admit, even if someone shoved bamboo under his fingernails, that he even missed the stacks of mortgage and securities fraud cases.  
  
If things had been different between him and Peter, he might have taken Peter up on his offer and come back now. It was nearly a year after the tracker had come off, just long enough to reset expectations. After his sentence was commuted, Neal convinced himself that he needed to discover if he could live as an honest man, to stand on his own two feet. At the time, he had thought that staying with the FBI would have been a crutch, and also a trigger point. He couldn’t help but feel that if he stayed, he’d be more tempted to cross the line, just to prove that he could. It seemed counterintuitive, but to him, it made sense. And now, now that he and Peter and El had a life together, going back would just complicate things even more.  
  
It had been a little more than eleven months ago, just a few weeks after Peter had rescued him _again_ , and a few nights after he’d gone to bat for him _again_. That time; however, Peter had been successful in getting the rest of his sentence commuted, and Neal had been over at the house for a celebratory dinner. He’d felt a little awkward about it; Elizabeth was home only for a few nights, just Friday through Monday, and Neal hadn’t wanted to interfere with date night. But she’d made it clear that they both wanted him over for dinner; with everything they’d all gone through over the past three and a half years, El said that they all damned well deserved a celebratory dinner. And when Elizabeth commanded, Neal obeyed.  
  
That night, he got a little drunk, more due to his emotions than the amount of wine consumed. He was going to leave out of New York, but wasn't sure of his destination. He figured he'd buy a ticket when he got to the airport. Probably Paris for starters. But it still didn’t feel quite real, or even right. He wasn’t exactly teary, but by the end of the meal, melancholy was his primary emotion. Neal gave the Burkes a sad smile. “Gonna miss you guys. You have no idea.” He reached for the wine and was going to empty the rest of the bottle into his glass when Elizabeth snatched it away.  
  
“What makes you think we won’t miss _you_?” Her tone was pointed, almost harsh.  
  
“All I’ve brought is chaos and complication into your life. You can’t tell me that you haven’t been counting the days until Peter can wash his hands of me.”  
  
Elizabeth put the bottle down hard enough to make the dishes rattle. “No, Neal, I can’t – but apparently you’re too blind and too selfish to see the reason why.”  
  
He blinked, trying to make himself sober by sheer force of will. It didn't work. Instead of trying to figure out what she was saying, why she was so angry at him – right out of the blue – Neal had stood up. “I guess that’s my cue to bid you goodnight. And goodbye.” He didn’t look at Peter once during this exchange, he was too scared, too overwhelmed by Elizabeth’s ire, by his own heartbreak.  
  
He made it as far as the edge of the table when Peter’s hand clamped around his wrist. “You’re going nowhere, Caffrey.”  
  
Neal’s heart stuttered, the way it always did when Peter used that tone – that affectionate growl. He had always avoided thinking about his reaction.  
  
“Sit down.”  
  
Peter’s command demanded obedience. He sat, still looking everywhere but at the Burkes. Then Peter sighed and the unhappiness contained in that exhalation forced Neal’s attention to him. “What? What have I done now?” There was definitely a lot of subtext that he wasn't able to decipher, and actual text, too – with El calling him selfish and blind.  
  
Peter looked at Elizabeth, then at him, and there was a kind of grief in his eyes that Neal had never seen before. “You know, you don’t have to go anywhere. Not if you don’t want to.”  
  
He tried to smile. “Ah, but there’s Paris waiting. And London.”  
  
“To see Sara?” Peter asked.  
  
Neal shrugged; he’d tossed out the city because it seemed expected, not specifically because he’d had any interest in getting back together with Sara again. There was too much water under the bridge, too many broken expectations. But he knew how much Peter hoped he’d find happiness there, and so he added, “Maybe, probably.”  
  
At that Elizabeth got up, briskly collecting the dishes, and in complete incongruity to her earlier behavior, gave him a bright and terribly fake smile. Peter looked away, his jaw clenched, and said, “Ah, okay. Then I guess there’s nothing more to say.”  
  
Neal felt like he was about to fall off the edge of the world. “I don’t understand. Do you want me to stay?” Which was a stupid question; of course Peter wanted him to stay. He’d made him a serious offer about taking a full-time position with the FBI as a paid consultant. Neal had emphatically rejected the idea. But this didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Bureau and a job.  
  
Peter didn't answer the question, leaving the words Neal wanted to hear ( _“Yes. I want you to stay, we want you to stay. We love you.”_ ) unspoken.  
  
Neal babbled, filling the silence. “But we’ll always be friends, right? Just because I’m leaving New York doesn’t mean that that has to change.” He tried not to sound so desperate.  
  
If anything, the grief in Peter’s eyes got worse, but he smiled – a familiar twist of his lips. “No, Neal – wherever you are, I’ll always be your friend.”  
  
The dishes crashed in the sink and El started to take out her mood on the coffeemaker. Neal watched her with a strange sort of fascination; he’d never seen her behave like this. “Elizabeth? What’s the matter?”  
  
She turned around and stalked back to the table, fury in her eyes. “You don’t get it, do you? For four years, I’ve watched the two of you do your little dance around each other. I’ve let you dance around me, and now you’re going to swan off to someplace halfway around the world, for what? A vague promise, the temptation of a life of pointless luxury. Can’t you see what’s been in front of your face for so damn long?” Tears rolled down her cheeks by the time she finished that extraordinary speech.  
  
“El? Elizabeth?” He wasn't sure he fully understood what she’d tried to tell him. He looked over at Peter, but Peter seemed as wrecked as El.  
  
Finally, though, Peter spoke. “For a smart man, Neal, you’re pretty damn stupid.” Peter got up and loomed over him; the hair on the back of Neal’s neck stood up. But then Peter touched his cheek, his whole expression softening. “I’ll never forgive myself if I destroy our friendship – ” Then his lips twisted and he gave a slight chuckle. “Again.”  
  
Neal held himself very still, as if he was trying to avoid discovery. Peter’s fingers still rested against his cheek.  
  
“But I’ll never forgive myself if I say or do nothing and let you walk away. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ they say, right?”  
  
Over the years, Neal had had dreams about Peter, strange and embarrassing ones. Sometimes they were filled with vague and inchoate longing. Sometimes they were startlingly explicit. Especially after those dreams, he’d wake up, hot and aroused and troubled, fisting his cock like some fifteen year-old boy. Ironically, the more vivid dreams usually presaged some well-planned criminal stupidity, like going after the music box, breaking into the Burkes’ house to find the manifest, BASE jumping off the forty-ninth floor of a downtown apartment building. He tried not to make too much out of them, they didn’t really mean anything, or if they did, dreams weren’t supposed to be taken literally.  
  
But Peter was standing in front of him, over him, touching him like a lover, and Neal didn’t know what to think, what to do. Except wait.  
  


  
  
  
It seemed an eternity, but Peter finally pulled him to his feet and kissed him. And everything in his life at last made sense. The pieces he had always sensed were missing – with Kate, with Alex, with Sara – even with Rebecca for that brief time that he’d thought he’d loved her – they were pieces of himself, pieces he’d given to Peter and never realized it. Peter’s lips on his put those pieces in place, gave, at last, him all the answers to the questions he’d been afraid to ask.  
  
The kiss broke only when he felt a small, hot hand on his back and he looked to see Elizabeth standing next to them, smiling brightly through her tears. “At last, you two. At last.”  
  
He and Peter didn’t make love that night or even the next one. Rather, they kissed until Neal thought he’d die of pleasure, then they negotiated what was certain to be a relationship filled with an almost infinite potential for disaster. Peter loved him and wanted him and he hadn’t been shy about telling him that. Elizabeth loved him, too, and wouldn’t mind welcoming him into her bed on occasion, but really, she mostly just wanted to watch and even more than that, she wanted them both to be happy.  
  
They looked at him like they expected him to freak out. El even said, “We’ve had years to get used to the idea, to plan for this. We weren’t sure that you wouldn’t walk out the door and never look back.”  
  
Neal, for his part, did an admirable job of hiding his freak-out. It wasn’t that he was starting a physical relationship with another man. That didn’t matter in the least. He’d never been completely heterosexual. There was Matthew, of course; Vincent, too; although his memories of both men were unpleasant. Besides, marks had been marks, regardless of sex. And staying whole and healthy in prison had meant compromise.  
  
But this was _Peter_ , the lodestone and pole star of his life, his _idée fixe_ , the goddamned sun and moon and stars, and for the better part of three and a half years, he’d been too afraid to admit that he felt something other than a manly, platonic friendship. That first kiss had changed everything.  
  
They talked and talked. They kissed and talked some more. Peter and Elizabeth kept him close for most of that weekend, but Neal eventually made it clear that he was going back to his apartment on Sunday afternoon. El had to head down to D.C. the next morning and the Burkes deserved some time to themselves. He was waiting for his usual cab ride when Elizabeth tucked her arm in his, pulled him over to her car and told him to get in and buckle up. She was taking him home and they needed to talk, just the two of them.  
  
After the events on Friday night, Neal had sort of been expecting this ambush, although he hadn’t been quite sure what she wanted to say to him. She pulled away from the curb and, keeping her eyes focused on the road, she dropped her own bombshell. “Hurt Peter and they’ll never find you. And if you think I’m kidding, just try me. My sister’s husband is in construction and you know that they still haven’t found Jimmy Hoffa’s body.”  
  
“I never want to hurt him or hurt you, except that it always seems to happen, no matter what I do.”  
  
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I think you’re going to do fine not being a criminal. You don’t have anything to prove anymore and I’ll do my best to keep Mozzie from leading you astray. I’m talking about fidelity, Neal. Peter would never say anything, he wouldn’t think it’s fair for you to be monogamous when he’s married. He wants you to have that, too. So he’ll never ask you for any sort of promises. But I am.”  
  
Neal hadn’t really thought about it like that. He was a romantic, he loved and loved deeply – at least for as long as that love lasted or until his heart was broken. He loved Peter, there was no question about that. It was a love that had lasted through lies and bitter accusations, through disaster and betrayal and murder and prison and anger and more lies and more anger. It would probably outlast their lives.  
  
“If you’re asking me to be faithful, I will promise that to you and Peter. I wouldn’t cheat on either of you.”  
  
El surprised him. “No. It’s really not that sort of fidelity I’m talking about. I know you’re not the kind of man who’d cheat like that. What I’m asking for is a different kind of fidelity; that you’ll be honest with us about your feelings and to be faithful to Peter’s heart, to the man he thinks you are. If there’s any point where you feel you need to end this because you want more than what Peter and I can give you, or you need to be something else, you tell us. Don’t pretend, don’t hide what you really what. And most important of all, please don’t walk away without a word, leaving us to wonder what happened. You need to be an adult.” Her words should sting, but they didn't.  
  
Neal understood why she was asking him for this promise. He had a habit of running when things got difficult. “You’re a very pragmatic woman, Elizabeth Burke.”  
  
“I’ve had to be. I know I got all silly and stupid and threatened when Peter’s old girlfriend showed up a few years ago, because I know that there are only two people in this world that Peter truly loves – me and you. Maybe it was because everything was changing. I still can’t figure out my idiotic behavior, so don’t ask me to explain my insecurities.”  
  
Neal had to smile, he understood Elizabeth better than she realized. “No, I won’t dream of it. It’s not like I don’t have a boatload of my own.” Neal thought about his father, the lying, cheating murderer who found it easier to run and let someone else take the fall than to own up to a mistake.  
  
“I’m trusting you with my husband’s heart. Don’t break it.”  
  
It had been almost a year since that first kiss, a year of perfect happiness. Well, not _perfect_ because his experience with perfection was that it didn’t last. But it was pretty damned close.  
  
These days, Peter liked to joke that he was basically a timeshare. Elizabeth got him Saturday through Monday, Neal had him from Wednesday night through Friday morning, and Tuesday was his day to recover. And more often than not, Neal was with them from brunch time on Sunday until El left for DC very early Monday morning. Except that their lives weren’t so precisely scheduled or compartmentalized. Sometimes El worked through the weekends and came back to Brooklyn for a single weeknight. Sometimes Peter went to Washington for a few weeks, working out of the D.C. office, leaving Neal to his own devices. They talked every night, usually by Facetime or Skype, and despite Peter’s absence in his day-to-day routine, Neal didn’t feel the slightest need to go back to being the man – _the con_ – that he used to be.  
  
Moz, of course, still tried to push him “back towards the light” as he liked to say, but had little success. And the man’s own criminal career was on something of a downward slide. Diana had told him he had a choice: either curb his criminal impulses and be a regular feature in little Theo’s life, or continue to indulge those impulses and remain a stranger to his namesake. Moz hemmed and hawed but ultimately gave in. He knew what was really important.  
  
“How are you doing?” Peter interrupted his musings.  
  
Neal tried to get up, but Satch had him pinned like a champion wrestler. And as Peter predicted, his legs were asleep. “I guess I could use a hand.”  
  
Peter put down whatever case file he’d been working on and came over, first enticing Satchmo back onto his dog bed in front of the fireplace, then helping Neal to his feet. “You okay?”  
  
Neal clung to Peter like a heroine on the cover of a romance novel, barely able to stand. His legs and feet were numb, then painful, as circulation was restored. Peter held on to him and helped him limp over to the table. He dropped into the chair in front of his easel and stretched, grimacing as the last of the pins and needles worked their way out of his limbs.  
  
“Interesting new work.” Peter nodded to the painting he was working on. “I didn’t think that Rembrandt was your thing. You usually prefer something lighter, brighter.”  
  
“Like Monet?”  
  
“Yup. Or Degas. Those pretty little dancers seem right up your alley.”  
  
Neal laughed. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”  
  
Peter smiled and shrugged. “What can I say?”  
  
Neal turned the chair back towards the easel and looked at the work with a critical eye. The old man’s face was not quite right.  
  
Peter casually pointed out what was wrong with it. “It’s been a while since I’ve been to the Hermitage, but I don’t recall the “The Old Man in Red” wearing wire-rimmed glasses.”  
  
_Ah._ “No, he doesn’t.”  
  
Peter left it at that. “Hungry?”  
  
Neal kept staring at the painting, doing his best to not see the face of the old man from the coffee shop superimposed over the sixteenth century portrait of a rabbi that he’d been trying to recreate.  
  
“Neal?”  
  
“Hmm, what?” He turned to Peter, who was staring into the fridge. “Oh, dinner. Supper.” He wasn’t really hungry. “I picked up some Parma ham and melon on the way home. You can have that if you want, or we can get a pizza.”  
  
Peter shut the refrigerator door. “Nah. Too hot for pizza, and I’m not really hungry, either. Feel like going for a walk? Maybe get some ice cream?”  
  
“Because it’s summer and the living is easy?” Neal smiled. He knew what Peter was doing and he appreciated it.  
  
“Yup, and because my wife will never know that I’m not having salad and a piece of fish for dinner.”  
  
Neal tossed a sheet over the canvas, and they headed out, leaving Satchmo to guard the apartment, or to sleep. Likely, to sleep.  
  


__________________

  
  
  
  
There was an ice cream shop on Broadway near 82nd that Neal loved. It was one of those little shops that had been in business for decades, a place that only the locals knew about and every one of them prayed that it would remain undiscovered by the outside world. Peter got a scoop of pistachio in a waffle cone, and Neal, in the mood for something simple and uncomplicated, got double chocolate fudge.  
  
It was close to ten by the time they started walking back to the house and the day’s oppressive heat had given way to a perfect early summer evening. Just a few days past the solstice, there was still a glimmer of light along the horizon. The haze had blown out to sea, leaving one of those rare, clear nights. The moon and the city lights drowned out even the brightest stars, but Neal didn’t miss them. During his time on the anklet, he’d missed the stars, he’d longed for a different horizon. For three and a half years, he’d dreamed of freedom. Sometimes that freedom meant staying at the Bureau, showing up and doing something meaningful. Sometimes that freedom meant traveling the world, living a life of luxury on other people’s money.  
  
He never dreamed of freedom being as simple as going out for an ice cream cone with his best friend and lover and going home and falling asleep in another man’s – in Peter’s – arms.  
  
Peter had finished his cone a block before they reached June’s front door, but he was oddly quiet. Not that he was the type who felt the need to fill the air with pointless conversation, but Neal had learned over the years that quiet and thoughtful Peter usually meant that there was something he wanted to discuss with him, and he was figuring out the best way to bring up a difficult subject.  
  
Neal didn’t have to work too hard to figure out what that subject was. He waited, though, until they were back upstairs, before saying anything. But in case he was wrong, Neal took the soft approach. “What’s on your mind? Is everything okay?”  
  
Peter gave him a steady look, as if he were assessing Neal’s mood. “I’m not sure.”  
  
“This doesn’t sound good.”  
  
“It depends on your point of view.”  
  
Neal raised an eyebrow at that. “It’s not like you to be so equivocal and Obi-Wan-like, Peter. What’s going on?”  
  
Peter still didn’t say anything; he just stood there, hands in his pockets and a resigned expression on his face.  
  
Neal decided to put both of them out of their misery. “The old man in the coffee shop, right? It has to do with him?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Kind of crazy, wasn’t it? Maybe he was senile.” Neal could hear his own disbelief. The old man was sick, but he wasn’t senile.  
  
Peter agreed. “No, I don’t think he was.”  
  
“Still, it was really strange how he thought I was this Felix Turner’s son. And while the possibility crossed my mind, I don’t think that James ever went undercover and fathered a child.”  
  
Peter expression was unreadable. “Let me show you something, okay?” He pulled out his phone, called up an app and handed it to Neal. “Take a look.”  
  
It was a picture of a picture, an old photo taken with a cheap camera. The colors were badly faded, but the image was still clear – there were two men, suntanned and happy, their foreheads resting against each other. Even down to the curling lock of hair on his forehead, one of those men had the face he saw in the mirror every morning.  
  
Neal felt himself start to shake. He shoved the phone back into Peter’s hand and all but collapsed into a chair. “Who? How? I don’t understand…”  
  
Peter sat down next to him and put his arm around his shoulder, anchoring him. “The man in the photo, the one who could be your twin – that was Felix Turner.”  
  
Neal grasped at straws. “We must be related, then. Cousins, maybe.”  
  
“Maybe.” Except that Peter didn’t sound convinced.  
  
“He can’t be my father – you’ve seen the results of the DNA test.”  
  
Peter withdrew his arm and got up, leaving Neal chilled. But he didn’t go far – just to the pile of folders on the coffee table. He pulled one out, checked it, and came back. “This is my fault.”  
  
“How could it be your fault? What do you have to do with my freak resemblance to a total stranger?”  
  
Peter signed. “Can you remember that time? Everything was crazy – more than usual. You had been so angry at me, Sam was a troubling enigma. I was worried that you’d go off and do one of your harebrained stunts and get hurt, or worse. When the DNA results came back, I looked at the name on the report and was stunned. I called you – of course – but I needed to get to you, to Sam – _James_ – and I hadn’t look beyond the information on the first page. I never did.”  
  
“Peter, what are you saying?”  
  
Peter handed him the file, but Neal didn’t take it.  
  
“Tell me.”  
  
“The DNA test that was done on the blood you got on your handkerchief wasn’t a kinship analysis, Neal. James was matched on a sample taken when he was in prison. Because it was in D.C., he was under Federal jurisdiction and over the last few decades, there has been a push to do DNA testing of all Federal prisoners, including archived blood samples. The blood from your handkerchief was a perfect match for James Bennett.”  
  
Neal didn’t think he wanted know where this was going, but he had to ask. “What was on the second page of the report?”  
  
“Like I said, DNA from all Federal prisoners is in a database. Including yours. The second page of the report noted that there was no kinship match between James Bennett and any other person in the database. Nor was it a match for the other DNA on the fabric – yours, of course.”  
  
Neal’s brain refused to work. He heard Peter’s words but they didn’t seem to make sense.  
  
“James Bennett isn’t your biological father, Neal.”  
  
“No, no – he said he was my father.” He took a deep breath and tried to get control of himself. “And it’s not as if James hadn’t lied to me before, or since.” Neal wiped his face, surprised to find he was crying.  
  
Peter put his arm around him again and Neal let himself be pulled into a comforting hug. They sat together like that for a while, until Peter broke the silence. “We’ve never really talked about her, but can you ask your mother? She’s the one who could tell you what happened.”  
  
Neal broke loose, now completely agitated. “No, my mother can’t tell me anything. She’s …” He paused and steeled himself against what he needed to tell Peter. “She’s been in a nursing home for a very long time, since before I went to prison. Advanced Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t know her own name. Hell, she probably doesn’t know my name, either.” There was a lot he wasn’t going to talk about, like all the years of mental illness that preceded her final decline. He waited for Peter to say something, to throw a fit about how he’d abandoned his parent to some kind of warehouse facility.  
  
And of course, Peter did just the opposite. “I’m sorry, it must be difficult.” That’s all he said, no questions, no accusations, no censure. Just compassion.  
  
Neal swallowed and looked away. There were too many emotions running too close to the surface. “It has been.” He went outside, needing the night sky. Peter joined him, but didn’t say anything.  
  
“So, if I’m not James Bennett’s son, who am I?” The question all but killed him.  
  
“You are Neal Caffrey. You are my friend and someone I love very much. You are talented and compassionate and smart. You are beautiful and strong. And even though you’ve made some bad choices at times, you are still the best man I know.”  
  
Neal let Peter’s words wash over him like a balm, but they couldn’t quite succor him. “This is the third time I’ve been remade, you know.”  
  
“Yeah, I do. And I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now.”  
  
“At least it’s not as bad as when Ellen dropped her bombshell,” Neal had to admit.  
  
“You were seventeen, you’d just found out that everything you’d been told about your father was a lie.”  
  
“I went off the rails, Peter. I ran away and decided to become a criminal.” Most of the time, Neal didn’t regret the path his life had taken, but there were moments.  
  
“Like I said, you were just a teenager.”  
  
“It might have been excusable then, but what about when I was thirty-five? That the lie I’d been told as a child really wasn’t a lie, and then that it really _was_ a lie? That my father was a liar, a cop killer, a coward?” The months that followed James’ disappearance had been the worst of his life. He had handled everything so badly – the bitterness of Peter’s mistrust, then his own anger, his terribly childish behavior and desperate need to prove that he was nothing more or less than a criminal, compounding the problem.  
  
“You’ve led a very complex life, Neal. Why shouldn’t your origins be equally complex?”  
  
Neal sighed. “I guess you have a point.” He leaned into Peter, never loving him more than he did at this very moment. “You must have spent some time with the old man after I left the coffee shop if you got that picture.”  
  
“Yeah, we talked.” Peter didn’t say anything more.  
  
Neal smiled. “You’re going to make me work for it, aren’t you?”  
  
“I don’t want to dump this on you unless you’re ready to listen.”  
  
“I think, after everything you’ve just told me, holding back might be the worst course of action.”  
  
“Are you sure?”  
  
“I’m sure. Besides, unless Felix Turner is a mass murderer, he can’t be any worse than James Bennett.”  
  
“No, he wasn’t. A mass murderer, that is.”  
  
“But he might not be any better than James?”  
  
“I didn’t say that.”  
  
“But there’s a lot you’re not saying.”  
  
Peter stared out at the skyline and Neal waited. Peter wasn’t being coy or toying with him, he was finding the right words. “Do you know who Ned Weeks is?”  
  
Neal thought for a moment. “The name’s vaguely familiar but I can’t place it. Is that the old man’s name? The man in the photo with the guy who looks like me?”  
  
“Yes. You probably heard of him because he’s a prominent gay rights and AIDS activist. He founded ACT UP, you’ve heard of that?”  
  
Neal was almost a bit insulted. “I might be fifteen years younger than you, but I’ve lived a life. And what does that have to do with anything?” Then the answer came to him. “Ah, Felix Turner was his partner?”  
  
Peter nodded.  
  
“And he died of AIDS?”  
  
“Yes, over thirty years ago."  
  
“And why would this make him worse than James? What if he had died of cancer, or in a car accident?” Neal was outraged. This prejudice seemed so out of character for Peter.  
  
But he was wrong; Peter’s reaction had nothing to do with prejudice and everything to do with understanding his need for a family. “It’s not how he died that might affect your feelings, Neal, but that he never tried to see his son, to be a father.”  
  
“Ned Weeks told you this?”  
  
“Yes, and he said that he didn’t even know the child’s name, that Felix never talked about him.”  
  
Now he understood the point that Peter was trying to make. “So, if I am this unknown child, I guess I didn’t matter to him.”  
  
“Maybe, maybe not. Things were very different thirty years ago. Ned said that Felix didn’t think he’d have any rights to see his son.”  
  
“Being gay, and all.” Neal could see the man’s point. “Still.”  
  
“Still.”  
  
They stood there, shoulder-to-shoulder, watching the moon sink behind the buildings, the lights from passing airplanes as they flickered across the horizon. Neal thought about all the times he’d wished he was on one of those planes, how he could leave everything and never come back. He didn’t feel that way now, though. He never wanted to feel that way again.  
  
Peter draped an arm around him and drew him close. “And who’s to say that this guy, this Felix Turner, _is_ your biological father? It could be a coincidence. He could be simply a distant relation. People do look like other people – there’s that whole ‘separated at birth’ thing you see on the Internet.”  
  
“Anything’s possible.” Neal agreed half-heartedly. “But it doesn’t seem likely, given the DNA report.”  
  
Peter sighed and agreed. “No, it doesn’t. Does it?”  
  


  
  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
With his permission, Peter told Elizabeth about the question of Neal’s paternity. El’s first reaction was to head over to the apartment and to make sure that Neal was all right. She insisted, though, that Peter stay home. Whatever she and Neal had discussed remained between the two of them, and Peter was content to let it stay that way.  
  
As always, he kept a close eye on Neal, looking for signs that he was troubled or unhappy. He kept watch on Mozzie, too – after all, the man was inclined to encourage Neal’s id. But for now, Neal seemed okay – shaken but not stirred, to use the cliché.  
  
And this time, things were different. Peter didn’t let Neal pretend that everything was the same and Neal didn’t dodge the issue. The question of his paternity wasn’t a frequent topic of conversation, but they talked about it often enough.  
  
A few weeks after the encounter in the coffee shop, Peter casually mentioned, “I’ve gotten a copy of Ned Weeks’ FBI file. It’s redacted, but I can share it with you if you’d like to see it.”  
  
“Redacted?” Neal didn’t look up from the Mary Cassatt he’d just started. Peter thought that the image of mother and child was telling – it was so emblematic of everything Neal must have longed for as a child.  
  
“It’s a fancy, official word for ‘edited’ – some of the surveillance details have been blocked out.”  
  
“Have you read it?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Anything interesting?”  
  
“You mean ‘relevant’?”  
  
Neal nodded, but he was deliberately keeping his focus on the painting.  
  
“A few lines.”  
  
“Can you share?”  
  
“You don’t want to read them yourself?”  
  
Neal didn’t answer right away. “Hmm, I don’t know.”  
  
Peter pulled the file out of his briefcase; he’d already marked a few of the pages with sticky notes. It was, as Ned had surmised, rather large. “A lot of this is …” Peter didn’t know how to describe it.  
  
“Ugly? Homophobic?”  
  
“Yeah, some of the comments make me ashamed to carry a badge.”  
  
“It was thirty years ago, Peter. The Bureau isn’t the same.”  
  
“You’re trying to comfort me?” Peter had to laugh.  
  
Neal finally turned away from the canvas. “Remember our conversation the very first day? About Diana and the hat?”  
  
Peter did – he remembered everything about that day. “Yeah, of course – you were sniffing after her.”  
  
“Flirting, not sniffing.”  
  
“Whatever.”  
  
“And remember what you told me?”  
  
“Of course. ‘We don’t ask, we don’t care’.”  
  
“And it’s true – the Bureau today is pretty much the model for tolerance and respect among government agencies. So, whatever went on over thirty years ago, as bad as it was, has nothing to do with the badge you wear today.”  
  
Peter had to laugh. Of all the people to give _him_ a lecture about the virtues of the FBI...  
  
“If it makes you uncomfortable, though, you don’t have to read it to me. If you can, leave the file and I’ll read it when I’m ready.”  
  
“Yeah, I’d prefer that. And I requested the information as a private citizen, not as an agent – so I can let you have it.” Peter left the file with Neal and said nothing more on the subject.  
  
About a week later, Neal gave the folder back to him. All he said was “Thanks.”  
  
“Any questions?”  
  
Neal gave him a sad smile. “Not really. It doesn’t say much of anything about Felix Turner. He was a style reporter for the New York Times, he had AIDS. He spent a year and a half in and out of hospitals, had five useless rounds of chemo and died in 1983. I suppose I could dig through the New York Times archives, read some of Felix Turner’s articles – maybe they’d give me a sense of the man.”  
  
“I don’t know if you’ll find what you’re looking for there.”  
  
“You’ve already done that?”  
  
“Yeah, I misused the Bureau’s periodical database and got a full printout of everything ever published by Felix Turner.” Peter had been keeping the file with him, in anticipation of Neal’s request. He pulled it from his briefcase and left it on the table. The articles were typical New York Times reporting from the early Eighties, the tone arch and smart and self-aware. The man who wrote them knew how to make words sing, make his subject sparkle, but he gave nothing of himself away. Peter guessed, in that respect, that the son was like the father. But he didn’t share that impression with Neal, better to let him draw his own conclusions.  
  
“I don’t suppose you’ve dug any deeper into Felix Turner’s life? Misused FBI resources even further?”  
  
“No, but do you want me to?”  
  
“What’s the point?” Neal seemed to be in a mood – dejected, argumentative.  
  
Peter didn’t blame him; that chance encounter a few weeks ago had left them both a little unsettled. “To give you some peace of mind? So you can figure out who you are, where you came from?”  
  
“Haven’t we already been down this road?”  
  
“We have.” Peter knew just where this conversation was heading.  
  
“Isn’t there a saying about those who forget their mistakes are doomed to repeat them?”  
  
And he was right. “Was it really a mistake?”  
  
“Peter, come on, how can you even ask that?”  
  
“Remember what I told you – before everything that happened at the Empire State Building?”  
  
“Of course I do – you said that you had no regrets, yes – but …”  
  
“No buts, Neal. I had no regrets then and I have no regrets now. Definitely not now.” He got up and went over to Neal, who was sitting in front of his easel, still working on the Cassatt reproduction. It seemed important to touch Neal, so he squeezed his shoulders before kissing him, a gentle press of lips against his forehead. “No regrets, ever.”  
  
Neal didn’t seem to take comfort from that, his tension still evident in the tightness of his shoulders, the stiffness in his posture. “I do, though. I have a lot of regrets. I wish … I wish I’d just let things lie. Ellen might still be alive. You never would have been arrested. Everything that happened afterwards – all that pain and mistrust. I regret every moment of that. I hurt you – I tried to help, but I just kept hurting you.” In his agitation, Neal tossed the paintbrush on to the tray, spattering color on the table, the canvas, his hands.  
  
Peter hated seeing Neal like this. He pulled him back against the length of his body, holding him tight. “And I kept hurting you, too. _That_ I regret. The lack of trust, the lack of faith. But everything else, no. I did what I did because you’re my friend and I wanted you to be happy, to have the answers you needed.”  
  
“And maybe you thought if I got those answers, I’d be less inclined to indulge my criminal impulses?” With sharp, almost careless motions, Neal jerked loose, but Peter didn’t release his hold. He wiped the paint off his hands, off the table, but left the spatters on the canvas. Peter didn’t like the sharpness in Neal’s tone.  
  
“Like I said, I wanted you to be happy.” Peter kept his hands on Neal’s shoulders, sliding one under the collar to rest on warm skin. He hoped that the steadiness of his touch, the simple contact would give Neal a little peace. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”  
  
To Peter’s relief, Neal changed the subject. “I saw Mozzie today.”  
  
“And how is he?”  
  
“He’s feeling a little constrained. Diana has him on a short leash.”  
  
“He has a choice, Neal.” Peter wondered how this evening was going to end. Neal seemed intent on sharpening the verbal knives. But he didn’t remove his hand and Neal didn’t shrug it off. “Di indulges Mozzie’s paranoia, his conspiracy fetishes, his bizarre taste in children’s literature and pedagogic theory, because she knows that he adores Theo, that he’d protect him with his life and that Theo will be a better child for knowing Moz. But none of that matters if Moz crosses the line and breaks the law. And not because Diana’s an FBI agent, because Theo’s well-being is her top priority.”  
  
Neal finally turned around, finally throwing off Peter’s hold. “Are you trying to tell me something? There seems to be a wealth of hidden subtext in that amazing speech.”  
  
Peter counted to ten before answering. Neal was looking to pick a fight and he wasn’t going to give him one. “No, you were the one who brought up Moz and how ‘constrained’ he was feeling. Is Diana wrong for not wanting Moz to break the law when he’s caring for her son?”  
  
Neal looked up at him and blinked. “You’re really not talking about me, are you?”  
  
“No, sorry, I wasn’t. It’s funny, but sometimes the universe does not revolve around you.”  
  
Neal gave a short, sour laugh. “Sorry – I don’t know what’s going on with me tonight.”  
  
“It’s okay. I can take it. I really prefer you snarking at me than burying everything under one of those fake smiles and telling me it’s fine.”  
  
“Or planning a heist.” Neal gave him a cheeky grin.  
  
"That's okay, too – if all you’re doing is planning…” Peter didn’t know if he should complete that thought. Neal was a great one for taking a mile when inches were given.  
  
Neal seemed to read his mind. “Nah, not even planning. But it’s good to know that I have your permission.”  
  
Peter thought he should make some outraged comment, if just for form’s sake, but decided that shocking Neal might be better. “Hmmm, I always wanted a Monet for the living room. Maybe we can work on that. If Moz is around on Saturday, maybe we can make an afternoon of it? You, Moz, me and El, because she’d never forgive me if I didn’t give her a piece of the action."  
  
This time, Neal’s laugh was filled with the joy Peter had become accustomed to hearing. “We can figure out how to relieve the Met of one of their lesser Monets. Maybe  </i>The Manneporte near Étretat</i>?”  
  
“Hell, why settle for a lesser painting. I want one of the _Water Lilies_ – you know, the big one?  
  
“The ‘big one’? Seriously, Peter – if you want to be an art thief, you’ll have to do better than that. You mean the 1919 canvas that was donated by Walter and Leonore Annenberg in 1998, right? The one that hangs in Gallery 822, which is part of the Annenberg Collection?”  
  
“Yeah, that one. I think it would really look nice in the living room. Right over the fireplace. Or maybe in the bedroom?”  
  
“It would clash with your décor, but I’m sure Elizabeth wouldn’t mind changing the wall colors and investing in some new bedding to go with it.” Neal finally relaxed and leaned into Peter. “Or I could just make a copy for her – would be a lot easier than trying to get one of the world’s most famous paintings out of one of the world’s most secure museums.”  
  
“Don’t tell me that Neal Caffrey’s hung up his lock picks and cat burglar clothes for good?”  
  
Neal looked at him, his expression a touch introspective. “You’ve tamed me, Peter.”  
  
Peter wasn’t sure he liked the way Neal put that. “Tamed?”  
  
“Remember what you once told me, I could either be the man or the con – but I couldn't be both?”  
  
He nodded – that speech had left an indelible mark on both of them.  
  
“I can’t have you and Elizabeth and Satchmo and all the happiness that you bring to my life and be the con. The thrill of the heist is so fleeting, a temporary high. When I was young and stupid, I thought I could have both that high and have love. But Kate died and the high was nothing but an illusion. It took me a long time to realize that I could have love, but I’d have to stop chasing the thrill. Nothing comes without cost.”  
  
Peter was moved almost to tears. “And we are worth the cost?”  
  
Neal offered no flowery declarations. His avowal was pure and absolute. “Yes.”  
  


  
  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
There were many things that Elizabeth could lay at Neal’s feet. Her gray hairs, all the nights spent waiting for Peter to come home, six weeks of endless and soul destroying worry when Peter was in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. The constant chaos that Neal Caffrey – conman, forger and thief, _reformed_ – brought to their lives.  
  
But for every negative, Elizabeth knew there were at least a dozen positives. Neal made Peter a better man in so many indefinable ways. The man she was married to _now_ was more attentive, more loving, more open with his feelings than the one who existed before Neal burst into their lives. Neal had taught Peter the value of living in the present, of valuing the moment, that all the planning for the future was pointless if today was not just as wonderful.  
  
Neal made her two-city marriage possible. She couldn’t see Peter, pre-Neal, able to make it work with her in another city during the week. Not that he’d be jealous of her or her life away from him. No, it would be just the opposite. He’d get so wrapped up in work, in being the big, bad, relentless FBI agent, that he’d forget about her. Peter wouldn’t stop loving her, but the life they lived together would become irrelevant to him.  
  
So she wouldn’t have taken the job in Washington but she would have always regretted the decision. And that might just have poisoned their lives irrevocably. Elizabeth sighed and smiled, happy with her choice and the state of her marriage.  
  
“Hon?” Peter was looking at her, a puzzled but fond expression on his face.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Should I ask what you’re thinking?”  
  
“You can.” She gave Peter her best Mona Lisa imitation.  
  
Her husband didn’t fall for it, just raising an eyebrow instead.  
  
“Okay, okay. I was just thinking about us and how we’ve grown.” El didn’t really want to bring Neal into the dialogue.  
  
“For the better, I hope.”  
  
“Yes – absolutely. We’re not the people we were when we met.”  
  
“Thank god!” Peter laughed. “I was a little … ”  
  
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘intense’.”  
  
He nodded. “Intense, but in a good way. Right?”  
  
“Of course.” El grinned.  
  
“Are you going to tell me that I’ve mellowed?”  
  
“I don’t know if ‘mellowed’ is really the right term. You’re not a mellow person. Maybe more thoughtful, kinder, less -” El bit her lip. She didn’t want to insult her husband.  
  
“How about ‘intense’ and leave it at that.” Now he was laughing at her.  
  
El reached across the table and squeezed Peter’s hand, rubbing her thumb across the well-worn gold of his wedding band. “I love you more today than I did fifteen years ago, and I didn’t think that was possible. I loved the man you were then and I love the man you are now and I will love the man you will be in another fifteen years.”  
  
Peter took a deep breath and let out a shuddering sigh – the precursor to tears. “Hon.” He picked up her hand and pressed a kiss on the tops of her fingers, then turned it over and kissed her palm. “I love you more than words can say.”  
  
In the background, a violin began to play and El sniffed and smiled. The maître d', Gino, who’d been at _La Cucina de Tua Nonna_ since Peter had taken her here on their first date, must have signaled the violinist to play “their” song – _That’s Amore_. He’d been doing that every year they came to celebrate the anniversary of their first date, well every year except when Peter’s ex had crashed their dinner. It was a silly piece of music, but it had been playing on the radio that first night and she’d hummed along, enjoying the faux Italian atmosphere.  
  
“Some things change, and some things should never change.” Peter said. “Don’t ever change, El.”  
  
“Ah, but that’s impossible, Peter. We all change – that’s part of life.”  
  
Peter picked up his wine glass and muttered, “You know what I mean.” It surprised El to see Peter so unaccountably flustered.  
  
“Hey – I didn’t mean it like that.”  
  
Peter recovered and gave her a wry smile. “Sorry. Sometimes I’m still that tongue-tied, too-intense guy who was too scared to ask the prettiest, smartest woman he’d ever met out on a date.”  
  
“And that’s the man I fell in love with, the man I still love. I don’t need your eloquence.” This time, when she smiled, she bit her lip and fluttered her lashes like the twenty-two year old girl she once was. And to her delight, it had the same effect. Peter’s cheeks burned bright red and his pupils dilated.  
  
“Shall we get out of here?”  
  
“Do you even have to ask?”  
  
Peter signaled for the check, paid, and all but yanked her out of the restaurant. Gino laughed and told them to come back soon, and maybe next time they should start with dessert – because they never seemed to make it all the way through a meal.  
  
Eager to get home, Peter drove like he was trying out for Formula One, maneuvering the BMW through the canyons of lower Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge. El grinned like a maniac. This, too, was a delight she could lay at Neal Caffrey’s feet and she’d have to send him flowers in the morning to thank him. She was taking a little mini-vacation and so was Peter – using the next three days to resettle their lives together. Come Saturday evening, Neal would be over and their happiness would encompass him, too.  
  
Peter pulled into the first spot he found in the neighborhood, about halfway up the block from the house. They were lucky, getting parking Wednesday nights around eight was always a dicey proposition. Everyone was home and enjoying the Brooklyn version of the American dream on this late August evening.  
  
She held onto Peter’s hand and they sort of skipped up the block, like giddy teenagers going to make out while their parents were away. Only to stop short at the sight of Neal, sitting on their front steps, a small duffle bag next to him, his face cradled in his hands.  
  
“Neal?” She and Peter said the name simultaneously.  
  
He looked up, and El couldn’t remember ever seeing him look quite so wrecked – not even when she’d visited him in prison after Kate had been murdered. Then, he wore one of his typical masks, deflecting her sympathy with a bright and patently false smile. Tonight, though, there was no mask – just raw pain and grief.  
  
“Sorry, guys – I know this is a big night for you, but I – I …” The words tumbled out in a rush. “I need to go out of town for a little while and I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye.”  
  
They sat down on either side of Neal. El took one of his hands and Peter put an arm around his shoulders. She asked, “Sweetie, what’s going on?”  
  
He took a deep shuddering breath and told them, “My mother died today.”  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
Peter never pressed Neal about his mother. Over the years, Neal had dropped small hints about her – that she’d been emotionally absent after James had disappeared, that Ellen had been more of a mother figure. He’d never pressed because he’d learned that there was no profit in pressing Neal about something he didn’t want to talk about. Especially something that was such a source of discomfort. It wasn’t fair to Neal and it wasn’t something that Peter needed to know to ensure his health and well-being.  
  
Two months ago, when Neal had dropped the bombshell that his mother was in a nursing home, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Peter could see Neal’s pain like it was a toadstool flourishing in some dark corner of his soul. But he still didn’t poke or pry, there were too many other questions, questions that Peter was ambivalent about asking, questions that couldn’t easily be answered.  
  
He’d let Neal set the pace, providing information when he could and remaining attentive to Neal’s moods. If Neal wanted to talk, they talked. If he needed to pretend that nothing had changed, Peter was willing to maintain that facade. Neither of them would deny that that chance meeting in a West Village coffee shop hadn’t altered something. But whatever had changed – it didn’t damage what was between _them_. They – Peter and Neal, Neal and Peter – remained as strong a unit as they’d always been. If anything, Neal seemed less secretive, less emotionally guarded, and Peter had to wonder if this was the result of learning that James Bennett, murderer and corrupt cop, was really not his father.  
  
But there were always going to be barriers, the no-fly zones – topics that Neal had cordoned off with metaphorical “do not cross” tape – topics like his mother, his early childhood. And tonight, seeing the man he loved barely holding himself together against the tide of grief, Peter resented his own willingness to let Neal keep him out.  
  
“Buddy – how about we go inside?” Peter looked over Neal’s shoulder at El, and she nodded. Neither of them listened to Neal as he fussed about not interrupting their date night, that they had better things to do than coddle him.  
  
“Neal, shut up.” El’s tone was gentle, but firm, firmer than his would have been.  
  
They pulled Neal to his feet and marched him up the stairs. Peter took care of the locks and the alarm while El steered Neal towards the couch. Satch, brilliantly sensitive, heaved himself onto the otherwise forbidden piece of furniture and draped himself over Neal’s lap, effectively imprisoning Neal until someone ordered the dog to get down. Someone being either El or him.  
  
Neal sighed, a teary shudder. “I’m really sorry.”  
  
This time, Peter cut him off. “Neal, you have nothing to be sorry about. We are – ” Peter was about to say ‘your family’ but that was probably a little inappropriate in these circumstances. “We love you. We take care of the people we love, and there’s nothing more important than that.”  
  
Neal blinked and nodded, but Peter wasn’t sure that he’d really heard what he was telling him. Peter forced a practical note into his voice – to give Neal something other than grief to focus on. “What do you want to do?”  
  
“Want to do?”  
  
“Have arrangements been made for your mother?”  
  
“Arrangements?” Neal still seemed confused.  
  
“For her funeral, sweetie.” El wedged herself onto the couch – Satchmo hadn’t left much room for anyone else.  
  
“Oh, oh. No – that’s already been set up. She’s – ” Neal swallowed. “She’s being cremated. But I have to go and get her things and her – Her ashes.” He wiped his mouth. “She’s been in that nursing home for a long time and everything she had is still there. Ellen had made the arrangements originally. She turned over what was left of my father’s…” Neal screwed his eyes shut before correcting himself. “Of _James’_ pension – or maybe she used some of her own money. I don’t know.”  
  
Peter’s heart ached, Neal was on autopilot, getting through this moment by moment.  
  
“I’ve been sending money too, over the years. Whatever I could spare. Which was a lot, back in the day – before prison.” Neal looked up at him, at El, begging for understanding. “Sending money was a lot easier than being a son.”  
  
Peter sat on the edge of the coffee table and took hold of Neal’s hands. “It’s all right, Neal. You don’t have to explain anything. You don’t have to justify anything. We understand.”  
  
“You do?”  
  
“Yes, we do.” He and El answered simultaneously.  
  
Neal sighed again. “I need to go.” He tried to get up, but Satch shifted and stretched, keeping Neal just where he was.  
  
“Where are you going?”  
  
“She’s – she was – in St. Louis. I have to go there.”  
  
“Have you booked your flight?”  
  
Neal shook his head. “I can get something out of LaGuardia tonight.”  
  
Peter recognized this as Neal’s modus operandi. He didn’t book in advance; he didn’t make plans or reservations. He’d get to the airport and just _go_. It was okay, though, they could manage for Neal when he couldn’t manage for himself.  
  
“We’re coming with you.” El stole the words right out of his mouth. “Peter, can you book the flight for us?”  
  
“Of course.” He stifled a touch of annoyance at being relegated to travel agent, and immediately felt small and petty. El was a nurturer, and Neal needed that nurturing. He fired up the laptop, and as he started searching for flights, his FBI-issued cellphone buzzed with an incoming call. He looked at the screen – it was Michael Tennyson, from the United States Attorney’s office – and he was worried why the man would be calling him _now_.  
  
He looked over at Neal and El, snuggling together on the couch. Neal was stroking Satchmo and El was stroking Neal, and for the moment, everything seemed to be okay.  
  
He put his hand over the phone. “Guys, I think I need to take this.”  
  
They both looked at him and nodded. Neal went back to petting Satch and El gave him a wry, understanding smile.  
  
Peter went out onto the patio and answered. “What’s up?”  
  
Tennyson started with an apology. _“I know you’re on vacation for the rest of the week, but you’re going to have to come in tomorrow.”_  
  
“Tomorrow? I’m not due to testify until Monday and I’ve been prepped so much, I could do it in my sleep.”  
  
_“Yeah, sorry about that. But Tommy Corelli dropped a bombshell in court today and you’re going to need to address it. I tried to get a postponement, but Judge Mickelstone wouldn’t play ball. She doesn’t care that you’re on vacation, especially since I made the mistake of telling her you weren’t leaving town.”_  
  
“This is going to be a problem.”  
  
_“No, it won’t. Corelli’s a lying sack of shit and you’ll be able to prove that.”_  
  
“No – that’s not the problem. I was about to leave town.” Peter was about to tell Michael that there was a death in the family, but legally, Neal wasn’t family. He knew Judge Eva Mickelstone, and that she lived by her calendar, expected all of the attorneys who appeared before her to do the same. She’d demand nothing less than a death certificate and copies of the cemetery paperwork, notarized and in triplicate, before agreeing to a change. There was no way Peter was going to explain about Neal Caffrey. “There’s been a death – a very close friend’s mother died unexpectedly. El and I were going to St. Louis tomorrow morning to help him get through the funeral.”  
  
_“Damn, this _is_ a problem. I’m going to need at least a full day with you – all of tomorrow and part of Friday. There are a lot of loose threads that need to be snipped.” _  
  
Peter scrubbed his face and looked inside. Neal and Elizabeth and Satch hadn’t moved. “Look – I’ll come in tomorrow – early, but I have to be done and out the door by five. If we have to pick it up on Sunday, will you be able to accommodate me on this?”  
  
Tennyson didn’t hesitate. _“Yeah, I can do that. I’m sorry about your friend’s mom. And I’m sorry for fucking everything up on your days off.”_  
  
“It’s all right. We all do what we have to do.” Peter hung up and went back inside.  
  
“Hon? What’s the matter?”  
  
Peter cut right to the heart of the matter. “I’m not going to be able to come with you, Neal. Something’s come up with some testimony and I need to stay in town until tomorrow night.”  
  
Neal nodded. “That’s okay, Peter. I wasn’t expecting that you’d drop everything. I wasn’t expecting you to come with me anyway.”  
  
“No, Neal – you should have expected that. Like we’ve told you before, you’re part of us. You’re _family_ .” This time Peter didn’t hesitate over the word.  
  
“Okay, okay.” Neal nodded. “Look, I really should get going.”  
  
Peter did his best not to laugh as Neal tried to get up, but was stymied by sixty-five pounds of Labrador retriever stretched across his legs like deadweight.  
  
“Sweetie, you’re not going anywhere tonight.” El explained. “The two of us are getting on a plane sometime tomorrow morning, Peter will fly down tomorrow night and we’ll see this through _together_. Got that?”  
  
“Elizabeth – ”  
  
“No, Neal. This is not negotiable and the quicker you give in, the happier we all will be.”  
  
Neal looked at El, he looked at Peter, comprehension finally dawning. “Guys – ”  
  
Peter nodded, went back to the computer and booked two tickets for a nine AM flight direct from LaGuardia to St. Louis for El and Neal, and a seven PM flight for himself. He made reservations for a car under El’s name, and a two-bedroom suite at a decent hotel near the airport. They could always change the reservation if the hotel wasn’t convenient to Neal’s mother’s nursing home.  
  
Peter finally signaled Satchmo to get off the couch. The dog gave him a dirty look before making an ungainly dismount. Neal winced and Peter wondered if Satch’s claws caught him in a tender place. He sat down and pulled Neal into his arms. “You have to remember that you don’t need to deal with stuff alone.”  
  
“I’ve been trying.” Neal finally relaxed against him.  
  
“I know. We’ve both noticed – but when something bad happens, you don’t go it alone. Not anymore.”  
  
The room grew dark as they sat together, a quiet trio, each lost in thought.  
  
El broke the silence. “We should go to bed, if we’re traveling tomorrow.”  
  
Peter never loved Elizabeth more than when she pulled and tugged and bullied Neal up the stairs and into their bedroom. Between the two of them, they got Neal naked, got themselves naked and under the summer-weight comforter. Peter relaxed behind Neal, an arm draped over his waist. El spooned against Neal’s front.  
  
They rarely slept together, three in a bed, and almost never in _this_ bed, but tonight, this was what Neal needed. It was what they all needed.  
  


__________________

  
  
  
  
  
“You okay?” Elizabeth asked him for maybe the twentieth time.  
  
Neal turned from the less-than-fascinating view of the airplane wing as it cut through a cloud bank. “Yeah, I’m all right.” That was as close to the truth as he could manage right now.  
  
“I’m sorry I keep asking you the same question, but I’m worried about you.”  
  
Neal reached out and took Elizabeth’s hand, squeezing it gently. “I know, and I know that if it wasn’t for you and Peter, I’d be a mess. Or more of a mess than I already am.”  
  
That was the absolute truth. He’d gone to Peter and Elizabeth’s last night with great reluctance. It was only El’s admonishment to never just disappear on them that kept him from going straight to the airport after he’d gotten the call from the nursing home. It wasn’t like he couldn’t send Peter and El a text or leave a voice mail or an email. He knew that if he just left without saying goodbye – even if just for a few days – they’d be terribly hurt. Of course, they’d forgive him – Peter quicker than Elizabeth – but there would be lingering damage.  
  
What he hadn’t expected was how they wrapped themselves around him, giving him no space to retreat, to slink off and lick his wounds in solitude. They didn’t seem to care that he’d crashed their special first-date anniversary. He didn’t expect that his problems – such as they were – would become so paramount. That they’d forget about a long-planned weekend of marital indulgence to take care of him.  
  
“It’s okay to grieve, Neal.” Elizabeth was as gentle as the summer breeze and as relentless as a hurricane.  
  
He sighed. “I know. I just didn’t expect to feel so – so bad, to grieve like this.”  
  
“She was your mother.”  
  
“I wasn’t much of a son, though.”  
  
Elizabeth understood everything he wasn’t saying. “You were all that you could be – seventeen is a rough age to learn that you’d been living a lie.” She squeezed his hand. “And you really didn’t abandon her.”  
  
“Really, Elizabeth? I ran away twenty years ago and never went back. For a few years, I’d send her a birthday card and a Christmas card and never gave her a reply address. When I heard from Ellen that she needed to be put into residential care, I just wrote some checks. I never wanted to know how she was doing.”  
  
“And yet you cared enough to give the nursing home a phone number to reach you when the end came. You cared enough to keep that information up to date, or at least to make sure that you could always be reached. Peter and I were blessed with loving families – but we know that you didn’t have that. You’re not a selfish man, Neal – you didn’t walk away and forget. You just couldn’t go back.”  
  
Elizabeth’s words should have been a solace. “But – ”  
  
“But you always thought that maybe, someday, you would be able to go back. You would be able to get a hug and a kiss and hear her call you ‘Neal’ and tell you that she loved you?”  
  
Neal wiped his eyes and whispered, “Yeah.”  
  
“I know, sweetheart, I know.”  
  
“It was an impossible dream, I know.”  
  
They sat there, Neal absorbing El’s wordless comfort. Eventually, the captain announced that they would be landing at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport in fifteen minutes, and that passengers should remember to set their watches back by an hour.  
  
St. Louis was much as Neal remembered it. Flat and humid and just not very interesting. El insisted on driving – she had the directions to the nursing home programmed into her phone and was ready to go. Neal just sat back and watched the boring scenery. Nothing was particularly unfamiliar. The nursing home was in the same neighborhood when they had lived and where his mother had worked – near Washington University. But nothing was strange, either. St. Louis was simply a place he’d once lived; his last attachment to the city was gone.  
  
The navigation program’s mechanical voice announced that their destination would be coming up, on the right in one hundred yards, and sure enough, they came to a gated driveway slicing across a lush green lawn. They stopped at the small guard booth and El told the guard that they were here about a resident. The man pointed them to a parking lot on the right next to a classical red brick building that would have been at home on some Ivy League campus back east.  
  
El parked, but Neal made no move to get out of the car. Everything was so … final. The engine ticked as it cooled, the interior heated up as the sun beat down. August in St. Louis was just as hot and unpleasant as he remembered. Neal felt the sweat form along his hairline, at the nape of his neck. It pooled under his arms and at the base of his spine. But he still didn’t move.  
  
“Sweetie?”  
  
El wasn’t rushing him, he knew that.  
  
Neal took a deep breath, unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the car door. “Let’s get this over with.”  
  
Even though he’d never talked about her, Neal hadn’t forgotten about his mother. During his con artist heyday, he had sent enormous sums of money to ensure his mother’s continued care. He’d trusted Ellen’s judgment when she’d chosen this place, and when he had the time, he checked it out the best he could. He’d even come here once, during a brief moment when Peter seemed to have lost his trail. It had been in the middle of winter, in the middle of the night – like a cat burglar casing a potential score. He had checked out the administration offices, the medical facilities, the kitchens and especially the residential areas. Except he didn’t go to see his mother.  
  
That brief and ridiculously covert visit assured him that all was as Ellen had reported. He also had Mozzie hack their computer system, just to make certain, and he’d found nothing exceptional. St. Mary’s Garden was a well-operated institution with a good track record and no red flags. There were a few lawsuits alleging neglect, but those were inevitable. He’d read the court filings and they didn’t indicate any sort of pattern of lapsed care. He also paid for an in-depth report on the home’s financials – which were sound. Even though he would never come to visit, knowing that the money he’d paid for this mother’s care wouldn’t be stolen helped quell some of his nightmares. Not all of them, but some.  
  
Neal stopped at the front door, steeling himself to cross this threshold.  
  
“If you want, I can do this for you. You can wait in the car.”  
  
He looked at Elizabeth. Her love and her compassion almost slayed him. “No, Elizabeth. This is something I have to do. But I’m glad you’re with me.”  
  
She nodded, threaded their fingers together, and they walked into the building.  
  
Neal was struck by a sense of peace that seemed to emanate from the very walls – something he hadn’t had the chance to feel in that one visit so many years ago. He’d been in nursing homes at least twice on cases with Peter. Those were places that radiated misery and they’d fueled his nightmares for months.  
  
“Neal, are you all right?”  
  
El squeezed his hand. He hadn’t realized that he’d stopped moving.  
  
“Yeah, I’m okay.”  
  
They went over to the front desk, its set up not all that dissimilar to that of a large hotel. Neal steeled himself and said the words. “My name is Neal Caffrey. My mother, Angela Brooks, was a resident here, and I was told that she died yesterday. I need to speak with – ” He tried to remember the name he’d been given, but his thoughts were jumbled.  
  
The woman at the desk gave him a sympathetic smile. “You probably spoke with Sister Clair.”  
  
“Yes – that’s it.”  
  
“I’ll let her know you’re here. If you’d like to take a seat, someone will come to escort you to her office.”  
  
Neal nodded. “Thank you.”  
  
Elizabeth guided him over to the small seating area and Neal sank down into the too-soft chair. She rubbed his arm and Neal was grateful beyond measure for this endless well of comfort.  
  
As the minutes ticked away, people came in and left, but he was oblivious. He couldn’t stop the memories – the ones that he’d ruthlessly kept at bay for so long. But they were good ones, memories of his mother playing the piano and teaching him her favorite songs. She’d been partial to musicals – not the brightly optimistic Rogers and Hammerstein shows – but the ones that had a thread of darkness in them. Her favorites were Pippin and Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar and Cats. Neal could still hear her voice warbling just a little off key to match the out of tune piano they’d had.  
  
He wondered, now, what had happened to the old instrument. It had been a fixture in their little house, wedged in between the living room and the entryway. His mother would scrimp and save to have it tuned every summer, but by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, it would be jarringly out of key. Not that it mattered. That little upright piano seemed to be the only bright spot in the sometimes endless months of darkness. When she could manage little else besides getting to work and coming home, when nothing could make her smile, Neal would try to play a song she loved. She’d sit next to him on the threadbare bench; her hands filling in the notes his own fingers couldn’t reach. When the songs were done, the music would linger like scent of wood smoke on a winter day. She'd ruffle his curls and he’d call her mommy, and they’d find a little bit of joy for a short space of time.  
  
“Mr. Caffrey?”  
  
A woman’s soft voice interrupted his memories. Neal blinked and focused on a stranger’s face. “Yes?”  
  
“I’m Sister Clair, we spoke yesterday.”  
  
Neal struggled out of the chair. “Ah.” He wasn’t sure what to say. Sister Clair was tall and spare, her habit more of a uniform than religious dress. And despite her sympathetic gaze, Neal felt intimidated, small. Worthless.  
  
“I’m sorry for your loss.”  
  
Sister Clair’s tone was sincere, but Neal had to wonder how she could feel sorrow for him. He was the worst of sons.  
  
“And is this your wife?”  
  
Elizabeth shook her head. “No, just a friend. Neal is very dear to me and I’m here to help him.”  
  
Sister Clair smiled. “We all need friends in difficult times. Come, let’s talk in my office.”  
  
They followed her, passing by maybe a dozen elderly patients in wheelchairs. Almost all of them had the vacant stare of the terminally lost. A woman, frail, her eyes cloudy with cataracts, reached out to them, crying something unintelligible. The sound made the hairs on the back of Neal’s neck stand up, it made him want to run and hide. Sister Clair paused and whispered something to the woman. She stopped crying, her face now wreathed in a calm smile.  
  
Sister Clair moved on, her stride businesslike and purposeful. They finally reached her office and she offered them coffee. El accepted, but Neal declined.  
  
“Tea, perhaps?”  
  
“No, thank you.”  
  
“Whiskey?”  
  
That got a laugh. “Seriously?”  
  
Sister Clair pulled a bottle of twelve year old Jonnie Walker out of a cabinet. “If you need it.”  
  
Neal laughed again. “That would be wasted on me right now. I’ll be fine.”  
  
She set the bottle back down and gave Elizabeth the promised cup of coffee, before gesturing for them to sit down.  
  
“Your mother was a resident here for over twenty years.”  
  
“I know.” Neal waited for the woman to chide him for failing to visit.  
  
But the chiding never came. “She was mostly content and quiet, she loved music and was calmest when something was playing in the background.”  
  
“Show tunes?”  
  
Sister Clair nodded. “Yes. She loved Broadway musicals from the sixties and seventies. Maybe a few from the early eighties. She’d sing to herself most days. Even when she couldn’t care for herself, when she was totally lost to the world, she still had a beautiful voice.”  
  
Neal didn’t know what to say. His head felt stuffed with too many emotions. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“For what?”  
  
“For never visiting. For never coming to see her. For being such a terrible son.” He shuddered and the tears started. They were uncontrollable. El held him.  
  
Sister Clair pushed a box of tissues over to him. “Your mother didn’t miss you. During her first few years here, she would say, very once in a while, that her boy had to go away, that he loved her, but he couldn’t stay. But she wasn’t like Mrs. Andrews – the woman we passed in the hall before – who keeps asking for her husband who has been gone for almost forty years. I don’t know why you didn’t visit your mother, and it’s not my place to judge, but if it’s any comfort, your mother didn’t seem to have any distress at your absence.”  
  
Neal wasn’t sure what to make of this news. “Did she ever ask for anyone?” _James? His father? A man called Felix?_  
  
That bubble burst. “No, not really. Like I said, she was content. As long as there was music playing, she remained calm. Almost serene. She was never very verbal, even when she first became a resident. She kept to herself.”  
  
“She was caught up inside her own head.”  
  
“That might be a good way to put it.”  
  
Neal had to ask. “What now?”  
  
Sister Clair reached for a folder. “There is the inevitable paperwork. Forms, of course.” She gave him a stack of papers, flagged with colorful stickers where he needed to sign. He did, one by one, not bothering to read anything. When he finished, Neal handed the papers back.  
  
“What else?”  
  
“You’ll need to tell us what you want to do with her things.”  
  
“Is there a lot?”  
  
“There is her clothing and some small decorations. A few small pieces of furniture that she came with when she took up residency here. We put most of her music onto an iPod, but there are some records and tapes. It’s mostly her pictures and papers, plus a few pieces of jewelry that we’d been holding onto when it was clear that she couldn’t wear them anymore.”  
  
Neal closed his eyes, picturing a gold necklace with a locket. A wedding band. “Okay. But what about her?” _Her body._  
  
“When your mother came, her friend, a Ms. Ellen Parker, helped her with all the arrangements. Including her wishes for her funeral, which is something we encourage for all our residents. To have plans made while there is time and the capacity to make that decision. Your mother specified a cremation.”  
  
“Yes, you told me that last night.”  
  
“Do you wish to change that? Do you want a traditional internment?”  
  
“No, no – I just wanted to know if I could see her.”  
  
“Ah, of course. Her body’s been taken to a local mortuary. Missouri has a forty-eight hour waiting period and requires a coroner’s certification before cremation. It’s just a formality, and they’ll probably complete that later today or early tomorrow. You’ll be able to see her and make your farewells.”  
  
Neal nodded, unable to speak. His throat was tight with fresh tears.  
  
Elizabeth stepped in. “We’ll arrange to have her papers and photos sent back to New York, but I don’t think Neal wants her clothes or any of the furniture. Right, sweetie?”  
  
He nodded again.  
  
“Okay.” Sister Clair took a more business-like tone. “There is just one last thing to discuss.”  
  
Neal breathed deeply and found his voice. “Oh?”  
  
“When your mother became a resident here, Ms. Parker had made it clear that the money she’d provided at the outset – I believe it was your father’s pension and insurance – was all the money that would be paid for your mother’s care. The sum was considerable and as part of the contract, we took the risk that the money might not outlast your mother’s lifetime. But your mother was made to understand that there would be nothing refunded at the time of her death.”  
  
“That’s fine.” Neal never had any expectations of a legacy.  
  
“But you also provided funding for your mother’s care. A lot of money, Mr. Caffrey.”  
  
Neal felt a flush burning on his face. That money – every penny of it – was the earnings from a life of a liar, a con man, a forger, and a thief. “I didn’t know about the arrangements Ellen had helped my mother make. I didn’t want her to do without the care she needed. If you need more ...” Neal would need to get in touch with Mozzie. There were still a few pieces that could be liquidated without raising any red flags.  
  
Sister Clair shook her head. “No, Mr. Caffrey, I was only bringing up your mother’s financial arrangements because I need to give this to you.” She handed him an envelope.  
  
Neal looked inside. There was a check for the entire sum he’d provided.  
  
“I don’t want it back.” Neal pushed the envelope across Sister Clair’s desk.  
  
“We can’t keep the money, Mr. Caffrey. We weren’t entitled to it in the first place.” She tried to hand it back to him.  
  
“I don’t want it.”  
  
“It’s two million dollars.”  
  
Neal ignored Elizabeth’s gasp and repeated, “I don’t want it.”  
  
Sister Clair grimaced. “As much as I’d love to say, ‘okay, thanks’, I can’t. If you want to donate it to St. Mary’s Garden, we’d appreciate it. But I can’t just pocket your check. There are all sorts of ramifications that the lawyers and the accountants need to deal with. It’s not that simple.”  
  
“Nothing ever is.” Neal picked the envelope up. “I need to think about this.” His brain was whirling. He didn’t want the money. It felt dirty and tainted. It _was_ dirty and tainted. But maybe something good could be done with it. “If I could have the name of your attorney, I’ll get in contact with him about a donation.”  
  
She wrote out a name and email address on the back of a business card and Neal put it into the envelope. He carefully folded it up and stuck it in his pocket. The weight of the paper was negligible, but he suddenly felt like Atlas carrying the world on his back.  
  
Sister Clair handed Elizabeth a piece of paper. “These are the directions to the mortuary. If you’d like to go there now, we’ll get your mother’s things boxed up and you can retrieve them this evening. Everything should be ready by five, tonight.”  
  
Neal stood up in a rush, suddenly eager to be out of this place. “We’ll be back by then. Thank you.” He forced himself to smile and shake Sister Clair’s hand.  
  
Elizabeth held his arm as they speed-walked through the looming halls, past the aides and nurses and elderly patients slumped in their wheelchairs or moving with fragile care. Neal couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think. He needed to be outside; he needed to be anywhere but here.  
  


  
  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
Elizabeth didn’t want to leave Neal alone.  
  
She gently coaxed, “Come with me, we’ll pick up Peter at the airport and we’ll go for dinner.”  
  
“No, I think I just need a little while by myself.”  
  
She could understand that – the need to retreat, to close the door on the world and lick your wounds in private. But she could remember all the times that people – she and Peter and Mozzie – had done just that and the disastrous events that followed.  
  
“Elizabeth, I’m not going anywhere. I just want to …” He gestured at the boxes that the nursing home had given them. “I need to go through them. I don’t what to ship everything back.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
Neal shrugged. “Please – just, just go get Peter. I need to do this.”  
  
“You shouldn’t do this by yourself, Neal. That’s why I’m here. That’s why Peter’s going to be here. We’re your family.”  
  
Neal looked up sharply, grief stark in his eyes.  
  
El wasn’t taking any prisoners. “Yes, Neal – your family. We love you, you are essential to our lives. That is what family is.”  
  
“I know, it’s just …”  
  
She understood everything that Neal wasn’t able to verbalize. The man he’d thought was his father wasn’t. His mother, as distant as she’d been, was now gone. The man who might have been his biological father had been dead for three decades.  
  
“I’m a man without a name.”  
  
“No, you’re not. You’re Neal Caffrey.” She cupped her hands around Neal’s cheeks and lifted his face. “And Peter and I are your family. By every definition of the word.” She kissed him. The kiss wasn’t sexual in its intent, but it wasn’t a gesture of the gentle affection she normally gave him. Elizabeth put all of her love into that kiss, hoping that Neal would understand what she was trying to tell him.  
  
Neal kissed her back and she could taste his desperation, his need for connection to someone who loved him, who needed him. They held on to each other, joined with arms and lips and skin.  
  
Finally, Neal broke their physical joining. “You need to get Peter.” The way he said her husband’s name, with so much need, so much longing, all but broke her.  
  
“Okay.” She pulled away, stroking Neal’s cheek one last time. “Don’t go through the boxes. Wait and let us help you, let us be strong for you.”  
  
But Neal didn’t make any promises and Elizabeth didn’t ask again. She picked up her bag, her keys to the rental and, against her better judgment, left Neal to sort through the ghosts of his past.  
  
A text arrived from Peter just as she was getting into the car. _We’ve landed, but they say it’ll be about ten minutes before we get a gate. Is everything okay?_  
  
She replied. _On my way. Talk when I see you._  
  
Other than the text letting him know that they’d arrived safely, she hadn’t talked to Peter at all. He’d been in his meeting with the U.S. Attorney and she was focused on Neal and getting him through this awful day. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to see her husband, to share this burden. Watching Neal grieve was almost unendurable.  
  
It took about a half-hour to get to the airport, just enough time for Peter to deplane and make his way to the pick-up area. He had just stepped outside when she pulled up to the curb.  
  
He tossed his bag in the back seat, made a comment about her impeccable timing and she burst into tears.  
  
Ignoring the annoyed honking of the cars they were blocking, Peter pulled her across the console and hugged her. “Shh, hon. It’s all right, it’s all right.”  
  
Finally, a cop tapped on the window. “Sorry, folks, but you have to move along.”  
  
“Just give me a second.” He touched her face. “Hon, let me drive, okay.”  
  
She sniffled and nodded. They changed places and Peter drove off. He didn’t say a word until they reached the airport exit. “Where are we going?”  
  
El gave him directions to the hotel. It was full dark by the time they pulled into the parking lot. It was drizzling. She knew they needed to get back to the room, but suddenly, she felt like Neal. That she needed time and space to grieve. She needed Peter and all the comfort he could give.  
  
“Can you tell me what happened?”  
  
“It wasn’t bad. Not really. The place – the nursing home – was nice. The people seemed to be very caring, very honest. The person we talked to was kind and compassionate. It wasn’t terrible.”  
  
“But it was.”  
  
She nodded. Her pain was not really grief, but the feeling of utter helplessness. “Neal’s so broken. I don’t know what to do.”  
  
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do except what we’ve been doing all along. Being there, helping him get through this.”  
  
She sighed. “And sitting out here, in the parked car, isn’t helping Neal.”  
  
“But it’s helping you.” Even in the half-light, she could see Peter’s love, like a tangible thing.  
  
“I’m okay now.”  
  
“You sure?”  
  
“Yeah. I am. Neal needs us. I left him with the cartons of his mother’s things. I wanted him to wait until we got back before looking through them, but I don’t think he did.”  
  
“We’ve got a long night ahead of us, haven't we?” Peter sounded resigned.  
  
“I’m afraid we do.”  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
Peter wasn’t sure what he was going to find in their hotel suite. Neal, surrounded by piles of papers, visibly distraught. He was prepared for that.  
  
What he wasn’t prepared for was Neal, freshly showered and dressed and sound asleep in one of the suite’s lounge chairs, bare feet propped on the other chair. After a quick glance around the room, Peter spotted the boxes Elizabeth had mentioned. They were neatly stacked and unopened.  
  
Elizabeth smiled and went into one of the bedrooms, taking his bag and leaving him alone with Neal. He sat on the edge of the armchair and watched him sleep. Neal seemed so much younger, and conversely, infinitely old. The stress and grief had left their mark.  
  
Peter must have made a noise because Neal stirred. He opened his eyes and when he saw Peter, he smiled. “Hey, Peter.” He held out his arms and Peter hugged him.  
  
“You doing okay?”  
  
“I’m better. Now.” Neal clung to him for a few moments and Peter relished the clean scent of soap and shampoo and aftershave.  
  
“El told me a bit about today.”  
  
Neal sighed. “It was rough, and Elizabeth – ” He shook his head in wonder. “I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t come with me. I owe her – and you – so very much.”  
  
Instead of reminding Neal again that they were his family, that this is what they did for each other, Peter just held him close. “It’s okay.”  
  
“How was your trip?”  
  
“As well as any flight from LaGuardia to St. Louis could go. An hour sitting on the runway in New York. Three hours cramped in a seat with no legroom. Waiting forty minutes for a gate. And then that lovely walk through the entire damn airport.”  
  
“Ah, the glories of modern air travel. You should hear what Moz has to say on the subject.”  
  
“Hmmm – I think, in this case, the two of us are probably of the same mindset.”  
  
“Which is really quite terrifying.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“Where’s Elizabeth?”  
  
“She went into the bedroom – I think she wanted to relax for a little while.”  
  
Neal nodded. “Like I said, it was a rough day and she kept me upright and going. She’s probably exhausted.”  
  
Peter didn’t mention El’s meltdown in the car; there was no need to.  
  
“You’re probably hungry – I can’t imagine that they fed you more than a bag of peanuts on the flight.”  
  
“Not even that. But I did grab something at the airport while I was waiting.”  
  
“And I’m guessing it wasn’t particularly good.”  
  
“You’d be right. I’m hungry. Are you?”  
  
“Not really.” Neal made a face. “But maybe sort of. You know what I mean?”  
  
Peter nodded. “We probably should get something to eat.”  
  
“I’d suggest getting a pizza, but it’s St. Louis…”  
  
“Yeah, and unless you’re a native, you’re probably not going to enjoy the local version of pizza. But there’s always barbecue.” Peter tried not to sound hopeful.  
  
Neal chuckled and shook his head.  
  
“What’s so funny?”  
  
“I had a bet with myself – that you’d want ribs.”  
  
“I’m a carnivore, you know that. My tastes are simple and straightforward, just like my personality.”  
  
At that, Neal really laughed. “You? Simple? Straightforward?”  
  
Peter smiled. He was relieved that Neal could laugh, despite everything.  
  
“What’s so funny?” El came out of the bedroom, looking a lot better than before.  
  
“Nothing. I thought you were resting.” Peter held out his arm and she came to him, leaning into his body. Peter savored her warmth, her smile.  
  
“I washed up, but I couldn’t really relax. Not with my two favorite men on the other side of the door.” She looked down at Neal. “You doing better?”  
  
“Yeah. And as you can see, I took your advice.” Neal tilted his head in the direction of the boxes.  
  
“Wise choice, young padawan. Learning, you are.”  
  
“And hungry, I am.” Peter replied.  
  
They discussed dinner and El put up a token resistance to Peter's desire for barbecue, but gave in when Neal produced a list of restaurants. “You’ve got your choice between prime rib, steak, bad chain Italian, barbecue, barbecue, barbecue, or bad chain Chinese. This isn’t a city known for its health-conscious cuisine.”  
  
Peter put on his best hang-dog face. “I had a turkey and spinach wrap before I got on the plane.”  
  
El snarked at him, “And that means you deserve a reward?”  
  
“I think so.” Peter knew that all of this talk about food was merely deflection from the real issues, the things that they didn’t want to talk about.  
  
Of course, they ended up going out for ribs and gorged themselves stupid. It was interesting watching Neal eat such messy food. Peter had figured that he’d go after the meat with a knife and fork wielded with the precision of the finest surgeon. But no – he was shameless as he picked up the ribs with his fingers and bit down, unconcerned that the sticky glaze was getting slathered across his face.  
  
Their dinner was reduced to a basket of bones, a pile of dirty, wadded up napkins and a half-dozen empty beer bottles.  
  
Neal leaned back against the curved wall of the round booth and let out a small burp. “I actually enjoyed that.”  
  
“I’ll say you did.” Peter handed Neal one of the last clean napkins and gestured to his chin, which was decorated with a streak of sauce and grease. Neal swiped at his face and missed the mark completely. Peter leaned over and licked Neal’s face clean. He didn’t think twice about what he was doing, completely oblivious to the fact that they were in a public restaurant.  
  
He kissed Neal, who hummed his pleasure and then he had his own moment when Elizabeth reached up and licked Neal’s other cheek.  
  
Neal made some comment about getting the check and getting out of there when someone roughly cleared his throat.  
  
Peter blinked and looked up. A large man – not only tall but broad in a highly unhealthy way – was standing next to their table. His face was red, and Peter didn’t think it had anything to do with the smoky heat in the room.  
  
“You’re going to have to leave.” The guy threw the check onto the table.  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“I said – your kind ain’t welcome here. You and your …” The man waved a beefy hand at Neal and Elizabeth.  
  
It had been a long time since he had felt this kind of black rage – maybe it was the moment that Neal had confessed to stealing the gold or when they discovered that Mozzie had emptied the warehouse after Elizabeth had been kidnapped. No, that couldn’t be right, because no matter how angry he ever got at Neal, he never wanted to resort to physical violence.  
  
He stood up and glared at the man. While he topped this guy by at least three inches, the man probably outweighed him by a hundred pounds or more. Neal grabbed at his shirt and hissed at him to sit down, that it was all right.  
  
“No, it’s not all right. ”  
  
“No, hon – you’re right. This type of shit is never _all right_.” Elizabeth slid out of the other side of the booth and walked right up to man, poking a finger in his chest. “I don’t like bigots.”  
  
Now Peter could remember the last time he had felt that black rage – when he had punched Garrett Fowler in the mouth after he put his hands on Elizabeth. Right after Elizabeth had poked Fowler in the chest.  
  
This wasn’t going to end well.  
  
Or maybe it was.  
  
The big guy stepped back and raised his hands. “Miss – look. We don’t want any problems. Just – go. You know what, your dinner’s on the house.” He gingerly reached around Peter, picked the check up from table and shoved it in his pocket. “Please, leave?”  
  
Elizabeth, apparently, wasn’t satisfied. “You think a paltry meal is good enough? You apologize to my husband and our boyfriend and you apologize now.”  
  
“Listen, it’s not me, it’s the other – ” He waved a beefy hand in the general direction of the other diners, or maybe the kitchen or the wait staff.  
  
El wasn’t backing down. She kept poking him. “I don’t care. We want an apology.”  
  
“Lady, look – you and your … whatever … are more than welcome to do what you want in your bedroom, but this is a family restaurant.”  
  
Neal got up and Peter caught his eye. They each took one of Elizabeth’s arms and frog-marched her out of the restaurant and back to the car. The night air was sticky and hot and in no way helped improve Peter’s mood.  
  
“I can’t take you anywhere, can I?” Neal commented wryly. “And I’ll drive – I don’t think either of you are up to it.” He held out his hand for the keys.  
  
Peter protested, “I’m okay.”  
  
“You were pretty close to decking that guy.”  
  
“And he deserved it,” El chimed in.  
  
“And this is Missouri, guys. It’s not New York. It’s not important.”  
  
Peter felt the rage bubbling again. “Yes, Neal – it is. I’m really kind of ashamed that you’d even think that. You’re really _that_ compartmentalized?”  
  
“Maybe I am, and maybe we can have this argument another time? Like when we’re not standing in a parking lot? Maybe after I pick up my mother’s ashes tomorrow would be a better time?”  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
Neal _was_ ashamed of himself. Not just for bringing up his mother’s death and using it to make Peter and Elizabeth feel bad, but for telling Peter that that guy’s homophobia didn’t matter. It did, and he knew that he should have been just as outraged, he should have been like Elizabeth and giving that bigoted bastard a piece of his mind. And he shouldn’t have shut Peter down either.  
  
But he was tired and barely holding himself together.  
  
He sat in the back seat on the drive back to the hotel, trying to think of a way to apologize without making things worse. No one said anything until they got back to the hotel. Peter stood there hands on his hips, frowning at the carpet. Elizabeth had a terrible, hurt look on her face. Neal wanted to forget this day ever happened.  
  
He finally broke the painful silence. “Umm, goodnight?”  
  
Peter tipped his head towards the bedroom that Elizabeth had claimed earlier. Neal shook his head. He didn’t think the three of them could share a bed tonight, not without breaking down. Peter nodded, took Elizabeth’s hand and they left him alone with the boxes.  
  
He stared at them, knowing that this was the wrong place, the wrong time to open them. But while he might have reformed his ways – become the man and not the con – he was still very much a creature of impulse. None of the boxes were taped shut and he opened the box on the top of the stack.  
  
Neal wasn’t sure what he was hoping to find – photo albums, old music, maybe piles of bills and receipts. What he found was his childhood inside an old shoebox.  
  
He sat down and held the box in his lap, both eager and afraid. Neal took a deep breath and opened it. There was a lock of hair wrapped in a blue ribbon. It curled around a tiny plastic box, no bigger than his thumbnail. The contents rattled, and Neal couldn’t resist. He carefully pried it open, only to find three tiny teeth. The rest of the box’ contents were just as disturbing. There were pictures of a dark haired baby only a few hours old, face scrunched up, lips pursed, skin still red from the trauma of birth. He turned the picture over and his heart stopped.  
  
_Baby Boy Neal George _____, March 21, 1977_  
  
The last name was carefully blacked out. Once upon a time, Neal might have thought this was something required by the Marshals, just one more way to erase their identities. But now, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe there was another name underneath that ink? Maybe it said “Turner” and not “Bennett”?  
  
“Neal?”  
  
He looked up. Peter was standing there, hands in his pockets and an unreadable expression on his face.  
  
They both spoke at once. “Sorry.”  
  
And then “Sorry” again.  
  
Neal held up his hand, “I’m sorry – that was a shitty thing I said to you and El before. I shouldn’t have used my mother like that. And I shouldn’t have been so willing to give in.”  
  
Peter sighed. “And I’m sorry, too. You’ve had a really rough day and maybe it would have been better for all of us if I remembered that we’re not in New York. I have to admit that licking your face in a public restaurant _was_ a little outrageous. And I should have remembered that you’re not exactly Mr. Confrontational, either.”  
  
Neal laughed. “Yeah – that’s true. And you’re right – I am kind of compartmentalized and I hate confrontation. Besides, I’ve never really put labels on my sexuality, it never mattered to me. And I’m certainly not one to take up the flag and man the ramparts for any cause.”  
  
Peter sat down next to him. “El says good night. She’s beat.”  
  
“Yeah. Not surprised.” Neal figured they could rehash the conversation they’d had before dinner. “I’ll apologize to her in the morning.”  
  
Peter, mercifully, let the subject drop. He reached out and took the shoebox out of his hands. “I thought you weren’t going to look in the boxes.”  
  
“I never said that.”  
  
“Well, maybe you should wait.”  
  
“You don’t need to do this with me,” Neal said and waited for the inevitable speech about them being a family and that this is what people do for their family.  
  
Except that it didn’t come. “I know that. I’m just saying that you’re in kind of a raw place right now. Looking through this stuff isn’t going to help.”  
  
Neal took the box back from Peter. “Maybe it will. Maybe it’ll help me make sense of things.”  
  
“Like who you really are?”  
  
“Yeah.” He leaned against Peter, loving his strength, his infinite patience, his understanding. Loving _him_. “I keep feeling like a part of me is missing. There was someone out there who had my face, someone who had fathered a son and walked away. The man I’d thought was my father isn’t.” He opened the box and pulled out that baby picture. “The name on the back could just as easily be ‘Turner’ as ‘Bennett’.”  
  
Peter took the picture and put it back in the box. “Yes, it could. But you’re not going to solve that mystery tonight.”  
  
“There could be papers in those boxes. I’ve never seen my own birth certificate. Maybe my mother saved it. She probably did.”  
  
“This isn’t the time, Neal. We’ll ship everything back to New York and we’ll go through it piece by piece. But not now.”  
  
Peter got up and put the shoebox back into the carton he’d opened. “Come on, let’s go to bed. It’s been a long day for me, too.” He held out a hand to Neal and when Neal turned to go into the other bedroom on the far side of the suite, Peter yanked him into his arms. “I really want to to sleep with us tonight.”  
  
“Peter – ”  
  
“No, Neal. I’m worried about you. You’ve been through a hell of a lot today. I don’t want you coming out here in the middle of the night and tormenting yourself.”  
  
He gave in. The day had suddenly caught up with him and he was too exhausted to fight anymore. Not that he had anything to fight about, sleeping sandwiched between Peter and Elizabeth was something to be savored, not resisted.  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
They were back in New York a little after three PM.  
  
That morning, Peter had let Elizabeth sleep while he and Neal loaded the cartons into the car and found a post office. They had a brief, but fierce discussion about where the boxes would be sent to.  
  
“They’re going to Brooklyn, Neal. No arguments.”  
  
“Peter – it’s my mother’s stuff. It’s _my_ stuff.”  
  
“And you’ll obsess over every single piece of paper; you’ll drive yourself into the ground looking for answers that might not be there.”  
  
“And sending them to your home will change that – how?”  
  
“This way we can go through it together. I don’t want you doing this by yourself.”  
  
Neal gave him a small, almost sad smile. “I’m not going to go off the deep end, Peter. I’m not the same man I was – before.”  
  
“I know that, but you’re still looking for something and you will be better off looking for it with a partner. Someone who’ll keep you from -”  
  
“Making the same stupid mistakes all over again?”  
  
Peter didn’t bother to deny the accusation. “And someone who you can lean on when things get too much. Someone who’ll call a halt when you’re ready to drop – or scream in frustration. You need to do this with a friend. With someone who loves you.”  
  
Neal looked at him and that small smile broadened. “How can I argue with that?”  
  
Peter wanted to kiss Neal, but this time he was aware of where they were. He made do with resting a hand on Neal’s shoulder and squeezing it. “You can’t.”  
  
They bought some tape and made sure the cartons would survive any damage the postal service could inflict on them. Peter wrote out the labels and put one on each carton, not giving Neal the chance to change his mind.  
  
It cost a small fortune to ship the boxes overnight, but Neal insisted. “It’ll kill me to wait.”  
  
From the post office, they went to the mortuary and Neal retrieved his mother’s ashes. He commented, “A whole life, reduced to a few ounces of dust.”  
  
“Have you thought about what you’ll do with them?”  
  
“I don’t know. I could get a memorial plot, I guess. There are places that store ashes.”  
  
Peter wondered if Neal was thinking about Kate, and what had happened with her remains. “It’s something to consider. But you don’t have to make a decision now.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
They went back to the hotel. Elizabeth was awake and dressed, and Peter didn’t interfere, he didn’t say a word, when Neal asked El if they could talk privately. They didn’t take long and both of them were smiling when they came out of the bedroom that Neal hadn’t used last night.  
  
There was another small argument when they checked out – Neal insisted on paying for the hotel room and this time, Peter gave in. He figured, at some point, that Neal would try to give him the money back for the plane tickets, but they’d cross that bridge when the bill arrived.  
  
Luck was with them and the flight back to New York was mostly empty and they were able to have the row to themselves. Not that there was much to talk about or much desire to talk. Neal took a window seat on the other side of the aisle and Peter sat with Elizabeth. Elizabeth pulled out her iPad, Neal seemed to sleep, and Peter spent the time watching his wife, worrying about his lover and doing last Sunday’s New York Times crossword puzzle.  
  
The weather was cooperative and the plane landed about twenty minutes early. For once, the gods of air travel were smiling on them and the plane pulled up to the gate without any delays. The conversation remained low key as they made their way through the airport. There weren’t too many good things to say about LaGuardia except that it was small and easy to navigate through. They got to the curb and although Peter cringed at the cost of taking a taxi back to Brooklyn, they didn’t have much of a choice.  
  
“Guys, I think I’m going to head back to June’s.”  
  
“You sure?” El rested a hand on Neal’s arm.  
  
“Yeah. You’ve both been wonderful, but I need a little time alone. Besides – you still have the rest of the weekend. This was supposed to be a vacation for the two of you.”  
  
“Sweetie – ”  
  
Neal didn’t let El argue. “If I ever had my doubts about your feelings for me, any doubts how much we mean to each other, they’re gone. You’ve shown me what family is, what family does for each other. But you also need to be there for each other.”  
  
He kissed Elizabeth and turned to Peter. “I’ll be okay. Trust me?”  
  
“I do trust you, Neal -”  
  
“No buts, Peter. I’m not going home and wallowing. And if you want to see me, you two can come over for dinner tomorrow night.”  
  
Peter looked at El and they both accepted the invitation. He joked, “As long as you don’t make pot roast.”  
  
El added, “Or spare ribs.”  
  
“No risk of either item on the menu, that I promise.”  
  
Neal took charge and maneuvered them over to the taxi stand populated by the acid-green cars that served the outer boroughs. As the taxi pulled away, Peter watched Neal get into a yellow cab. He couldn’t help but worry.  
  
“He’ll be okay, hon.”  
  
“You sure?”  
  
“Yeah. Didn’t you say that Neal had his mother’s stuff sent overnight to the house?”  
  
Peter nodded, not following El’s train of thought.  
  
“Which means they’ll be delivered tomorrow.”  
  
“And?”  
  
“And Neal invited us over to his place tomorrow night.”  
  
“Ah.” The light dawned.  
  
“Yes, _ah_.”  
  
Maybe Neal would be all right.  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
Neal was looking forward to a quiet evening doing nothing more strenuous than finishing the bottle of wine he had just started when he’d gotten the call from the nursing home on Wednesday. He wanted to sit on the terrace and watch the sunset and think about nothing more important than whether he should have Chinese or Thai food for dinner.  
  
Maybe a little sketching, if he could be so motivated. Nothing more than that. Like Greta Garbo, he wanted to be alone.  
  
But what he wanted and what he got were two different things. Mozzie was waiting for him and not only had he finished the bottle of Barolo that Neal had started on Wednesday, he’d drank most of the Sancerre that he’d recently acquired.  
  
“Thanks for the text, _mon frère_. I get worried when you quote Camus.”  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“Your rather terse message – ‘Mother died today’. It’s the opening line of _The Stranger_ , and I don’t mean the Billy Joel hit.”  
  
“Ah.” Neal took a clean glass off the rack and emptied the rest of the Sancerre into it. “You have nothing to worry about. I’m fine.”  
  
“Did you cry?”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“Did you cry? The protagonist in _The Stranger_ didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral. That condemned him to death.”  
  
Neal struggled to keep a rein on his temper. He was not in the mood for Mozzie’s byzantine thought processes. “I wept, okay?”  
  
“Good.” Mozzie went back to the contemplation of his wine.  
  
Neal opened his duffle bag and pulled out a small, paper-wrapped box and set it on the mantle. It seemed like such a cliché.  
  
“What’s that?”  
  
“Do you really want to know?” Neal went back to the table and picked up his wine, giving Moz a very pointed stare.  
  
“Ah.”  
  
Neal left Moz sitting at the table and went out on the terrace. It was late August and there was just the tiniest hint of autumn in the cool breeze coming off the Hudson. He couldn’t help the melancholy. Time was always moving forward, it never stopped no matter how desperately you wanted it to. He had to smile at that thought, because once upon a time, he marked off every passing day, cursing the slowness of time. Once upon a time, he couldn’t wait to be free of his leash, he couldn’t wait to leave.  
  
And yet the summer passed in the blink of an eye. So had the last two decades of his life.  
  
“Who’s Felix Turner?”  
  
Neal hadn’t realized that Moz had joined him on the terrace. He didn’t answer his friend.  
  
“You’re not going to tell me?”  
  
Neal sighed. He had never told Moz about his encounter with Ned Weeks for a number of reasons. His friend still had trouble accepting his relationship with Peter and Elizabeth, and not just because Neal was in love with a Suit. Moz – for all his counter-culture, anarchist, down-with-the-Man philosophy – was extraordinarily conservative when it came to personal relationships. He didn’t understand how Peter could sleep with him and still stay married to Elizabeth. How Elizabeth could occasionally sleep with him and still be wholly committed to Peter. It didn’t compute in Mozzie’s head and Neal got tired of trying to explain it. It had become the thin edge of a wedge driving them apart.  
  
He’d have to explain why he’d gone all the way downtown to see Peter and end up diverted by another diatribe on how he would forever remain a captive to the FBI as long as he was at their beck and call. Moz would then spiral off into some not so veiled criticisms of his lifestyle and by the time he’d finish, Neal knew he’d be as close to committing violence against his oldest and dearest friend as he ever was. He’d probably never even get a chance to tell him about Ned.  
  
And then there was the whole issue of family. Moz was still unwilling to give up hope that his parents were out there, that they’d been forced to give him up, that they’d never stopped looking for him. Telling Moz that James _wasn’t_ really his father seemed wrong, cruel.  
  
Or maybe these reasons were just excuses. Maybe he didn’t want to tell Moz because he wasn’t prepared to deal with it himself. His friend might enable him in many ways, but not when it came to hiding from unpleasant truths.  
  
“Neal?”  
  
“How do _you_ know about Felix Turner?” Might as well come out swinging.  
  
“You left a folder with a stack of New York Times articles on your table. Fashion and lifestyle pieces from the early 1980s. Turner’s name was on all the by-lines. Either you’ve got a client who’s really into retro-disco or …”  
  
Neal wondered if he should take the easy way out. But this was Moz and lies would put even more of a distance between them. “Felix Turner might be my father.”  
  
Moz didn’t say a word but Neal could feel the anger vibrating off him.  
  
“And by might, I mean it’s really very likely that he is.” Neal gave a very condensed version of the story – how the DNA report was not based on a kinship analysis, how he was not James’ child. He glossed over the encounter with Ned Weeks, simply saying that he’d met a man who had known someone who bore an extraordinary resemblance to him. A man who had a son who would be close to his own age.  
  
“Why wouldn’t you share this? After everything? After all we’ve been through together? I don’t understand.”  
  
“Because you’re like a dog with a bone, you wouldn’t let it go. It’s kind of difficult to deal with and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, okay?”  
  
“Does the Suit know?”  
  
Neal nodded.  
  
“Of course _he_ does,” Moz spat out bitterly. “You always go to him when you need help.”  
  
“You’re not exactly a soft shoulder to cry on, Moz,” Neal snapped back. “And for what it’s worth, Peter was with me when I found out.”  
  
Moz grabbed his wine glass and polished off the contents. “Were you ever going to tell me?”  
  
“I don’t know.” Neal didn’t bother to soften the blow.  
  
“You’re a fucking lucky bastard, Neal. Two fathers – when I don’t even have one.”  
  
“Maybe you’re better off, because if I am Felix Turner’s son, he walked out on me shortly after I was born.”  
  
That seemed to quell some of Mozzie’s anger. “Want me to hunt him down for you?”  
  
“You can’t. He died in 1983.”  
  
“Ah. Sorry.” His friend’s sympathy was sincere.  
  
“Don’t envy me, Moz. My mother’s dead, the man I’d thought was my father is a liar and a murderer. The man who might have fathered me walked out of my life and never looked back. At least you have your dreams. I don’t even have the comfort of any illusions.”  
  
Neal leaned on the balustrade and tried to recover his sense of self, something that had been eluding him for months, since that chance encounter in a West Village coffee shop. “I don’t know who I am anymore. When I was a child, I wanted to be a cop because that’s what my daddy was. When I found out that he was really a criminal, that’s what I became. When I swallowed James’ lies – I thought all I wanted to be was a better man. Then I learned the real truth. And you saw how that worked out.”  
  
“And now?”  
  
“I don’t know, Moz. I just don’t know.”  
  
“Maybe you should try and be yourself. I hate to admit it, but you have a good life, Neal. You have everything you’ve really ever wanted. People who care about you. Meaningful work. Enough money to live well. You have opportunities that some of us will never have. Whoever your father is – whether it’s James the Criminal or Felix the Journalist – you shouldn’t let that dictate who _you_ are.”  
  
Something snapped into place. For most of his adult life, he’d believed that he was nothing more than his father’s son – that he’d never be more than the child of a dirty cop and he set out to prove it. He’d let his world be rocked time and again when he should have believed in himself. He needed to stop being the child who too abruptly discovered that his whole childhood was a lie. This was something that Peter had been trying to tell him for years, but he had never seemed to hear it. Whatever was different now wasn’t important. He finally understood. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it just might be possible that he really could be Neal Caffrey, self-made man. “Thank you, Moz.”  
  
“For what?”  
  
“For …” Neal smiled. “For being here when I least wanted to see anyone, but when I most needed to see you.”  
  
“Humph, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”  
  
“Then how about ‘Thank you for being who you are’. Or ‘Thank you for being my friend’.”  
  
Moz looked at him, a smile slowly curving his lips. “I am that, your friend.”  
  
Neal slung an arm around him. “Yes, that you are.”  
  


__________________

  
  
  
  
  
  
The boxes arrived from St. Louis mid-morning Saturday and the postman had given Peter a dirty look as he hauled each of the cartons up the front steps. That dirty look had turned grateful as Peter shook the man’s hand and slipped him twenty bucks.  
  
Following El’s instructions, he had stacked the boxes in the corner, between the couch and the fireplace, and tried not to think about the secrets those boxes held. And the irony of that didn't escape him. The music box and its secrets. Ellen Parker’s evidence box.  
  
“Are you going to call Neal and let him know they arrived?” El tucked herself under his arm and rested her head against his chest.  
  
“No – he’ll probably call and ask. Or we can tell him when we see him tonight.”  
  
They had dinner at Neal’s that Saturday night. He made Chicken Veronique – a dish that Peter would never have dreamed of ordering, on account of its overly fussy French name. “It sounds a hell of a lot more impressive than it actually is.”  
  
Between the entree and the dessert, Peter casually mentioned that the boxes had arrived. Neal just nodded and served him a slice of the raspberry-peach torte with vanilla ice cream. He didn’t ask if Neal wanted to come over during the week and go through them and Neal didn’t ask if he could.  
  
El just watched the pair of them with narrowed and understanding eyes.  
  
The boxes remained in the living room as summer came to its unofficial close on Labor Day. Peter went down to D.C. to spend the holiday weekend with El and left Satchmo in Neal’s care, wondering if he’d want to use the time to start going through the boxes without his interference. But Neal surprised him, offering to keep Satch in his apartment for the three days. Not that that would have stopped Neal, who had a key to the house and knew the alarm code. Not to mention the fact that he was more than competent with a set of lock picks and had circumvented more sophisticated security systems.  
  
But Peter came home late Monday afternoon and the boxes were unmolested. He repacked his overnight bag, exchanging his weekend casual clothes for the suit he’d needed for the office the next morning. That hadn’t been the plan – he was only supposed to pick Satch up, maybe share a meal with Neal and then head back to the house. But he missed Neal a lot more than he missed his bed and sent him a quick text asking if there’d be a problem if he spent the night.  
  
Neal responded quickly and unequivocally. _No. Can’t wait._  
  
He had finished his third beer before asking Neal about the boxes.  
  
“You said you didn’t want me to go through them without you.”  
  
Peter just raised an eyebrow. “And you’re so good at following my instructions.”  
  
Neal laughed. “I’ve gotten better over the years, don’t you think?”  
  
Peter laughed as well, knowing just how foolish a statement that was.  
  
Summer came to its official end and the three of them went away for a long weekend in Vermont, before the leaf-peepers crowded the scenic byways. Still, Neal made no move to look inside the boxes and Peter stopped asking.  
  
Periodically, he’d ask Neal how he was doing, and to his surprise, Neal started opening about personal things: his feelings about his mother, even about James and the damage the man had done to him. Felix Turner, however, remained a closed subject. Neal didn't mention the name or the boxes and Peter didn't either.  
  
They remained undisturbed until mid-October, when Elizabeth needed to stay in D.C. over the long Columbus Day weekend and Peter didn’t join her. As much as she missed him, El suggested he stay in New York; they’d have little time together over the weekend. She had back-to-back fundraisers and would be on the go from the time she woke up on Saturday until well after midnight Monday morning. He took her advice and decided to stay home. The long weekend would be a good time to tackle some of the chores that always needed to be done this time of year.  
  
And this year, he’d have help. Friday morning, before he left Neal’s apartment to go to the office, Peter told him that he was expected at the house in Brooklyn bright and early, and to dress appropriately. There was messy work to be done.  
  
A little after nine, Neal arrived, wearing a flannel shirt and paint spattered jeans. Peter wasn’t surprised about the jeans, but the flannel – red and black and green plaid – wasn’t something he’d ever expected to see gracing the body of Neal Caffrey. But he forbore commenting, handed Neal a pair of work gloves and directed him out to the patio with the simple instruction that the gutters needed to be cleaned.  
  
That task finished, they trimmed the vines that decorated the trellis, then packed up the grill and the patio furniture and moved it to the basement. It was a little after one when Peter declared them done for the day.  
  
“Beer?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
Hours earlier, Neal had stripped off the flannel shirt and had worked up a sweat in his white cotton tee shirt. Peter had enjoyed the view, particularly when the tight cotton rode up his body, giving him teasing glimpses of smooth, pale flesh.  
  
He wondered if Neal would be up to sharing a shower and giving him a bit more of a show.  
  
“Moz is coming over in a bit. Hope you don’t mind.”  
  
Nothing like getting doused with a bucket of ice water. “Sure, no problem.” He hadn’t seen much of Moz lately. The man had sternly disapproved of the romantic relationship between the three of them and it had made for some very awkward moments. He knew that Moz had, on several occasions, visited Elizabeth in D.C., but in keeping with a well-honed need for self-preservation, he’d refrained from asking his wife about the details of her friendship with Moz.  
  
“I thought that it would be a good time for the three of us to go through the boxes.” Neal tilted his head towards the corner of the living room.  
  
“That sounds like an excellent idea.”  
  
Neal raised an eyebrow. “You really think so?”  
  
“Yeah, I do. It’s the family thing, remember? Moz is your family. And family -”  
  
“Helps each other get through the hard stuff, right?”  
  
“Right. You’re learning.”  
  
“I haven’t told Moz the whole story – about meeting Ned.”  
  
“No?” That surprised Peter; he thought that there was little that Neal didn’t share with Moz.  
  
“No – and I didn’t tell him until after I got back from St. Louis. I actually didn’t tell him until he found the file with Felix’s New York Times articles.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Do you really need to ask?”  
  
Peter thought about it for a moment, knowing Moz’s sensitivity about family, Neal’s unwillingness to deal with things. Kind of a toxic combination. “Ah, yeah.”  
  
“So – unless Moz asks for details about how I found out about Felix Turner, let’s not go into it.”  
  
Peter wasn’t sure why the random encounter with Ned Weeks needed to be treated like a state secret, but it wouldn’t cost him anything to do as Neal asked.  
  
He was just about to fetch them fresh bottles of beer when the doorbell rang. “That would be Moz.”  
  
And it was. Moz looked at him, taking note of the sweat-stained LaMoyne tee shirt and Neal’s equally dirty white undershirt and wrinkled his nose. “I guess it was too much to expect you not to indulge your – ahem – carnal needs in the sanctity of Mrs. Suit’s home.”  
  
Before Peter could formulate a cutting reply, Neal chuckled, clapped Moz on the back and answered. “Well, if you consider cleaning the gutters, cleaning up the leaves and moving patio furniture to be indulging our carnal needs, you might need a refresher course on human sexuality.”  
  
“Hmm.” Moz glared at both of them and set a bag on the table with a heavy thunk. “If we’re going to spend the afternoon trawling through Neal’s childhood, I’m going to need alcohol.”  
  
“Should I bother with a glass for you?” Peter couldn’t help the snark in his voice. Moz was deliberately trying to set him on edge.  
  
“No, but a corkscrew will help.”  
  
Neal retrieved the required implement and a wine glass, putting them in front of Moz before giving both of them a stern look. “Do we need some ground rules here?”  
  
Peter stifled a smile as Mozzie muttered something about being here for Neal in his time of need as he busied himself with the wine.  
  
“Then let’s get started.” Neal hefted the first box onto the table and opened it. It contained only CDs and cassette tapes, but Neal asked that they look at each of them. “I don’t know what’s here – and I don’t know what, if anything, I’ll find – but …”  
  
“But you never know,” Moz finished for him.  
  
And naturally, the music yielded nothing but music. When they finished, Neal asked, “Does Goodwill take this stuff?”  
  
“Probably. You don’t want any of them?”  
  
“No.”  
  
The next box was more exciting, in its own way. Neal’s – or rather Danny Brooks’ – elementary school report cards and art projects – everything sorted by year and labeled. There were birthday cards that he’d made for his mother, one for each year from the time he was six until he was seventeen, each one carefully preserved and annotated.  
  
Neal let out a deep, shuddering breath.  
  
“You okay?”  
  
He shrugged. “I guess so. I should have expected this. What do I do with all of it?”  
  
“What do you want to do? Do you want any of it?”  
  
Neal scrubbed his face. “I – I don’t know.” He picked up the birthday cards. “I’ll keep these.”  
  
“And I’ll take care of the rest.” Moz piped up, putting everything else back in the box. “Are you okay with that?”  
  
Peter wasn’t sure what Moz was going to do with the stuff, but he felt an upwelling of gratitude for the man’s willingness to shoulder that burden.  
  
The next box was a mix of the mundane and the dramatic. There was a pile of sheet music – all show tunes. Neal flipped through and took out two pieces – _Sunrise, Sunset_ and oddly telling, _Memory_ , from _Cats_ – and put the rest with the items heading to Goodwill. Underneath the sheet music were photo albums.  
  
Neal bowed his head and set them aside. “I’ll look at them later, okay?”  
  
Both Peter and Moz nodded. What could they say?  
  
Two more boxes yielded more childhood memorabilia. In addition to the shoebox that Neal had unearthed that night in St. Louis were framed photographs of people who might have been Neal’s maternal grandparents. There were also pictures of Neal as a young boy – formal school photographs of a child who was instructed to smile. Peter wanted to linger, to ask questions, but Neal was eager to press on. Underneath the pictures was a blanket crocheted in baby blue yarn, a pair of tiny shoes and a soft cotton hat with a blue rabbit embroidered on it. Someone once loved Neal very much. He sighed again and Peter asked, “Do you want to take a break?”  
  
“No.” Neal reached into the box and pulled out, of all things, a rabbit. The fuzz was mostly worn off, its button eyes long gone, the ears stained and tattered. “I think Ellen gave me this, right before we left D.C. I remember holding it on a long car ride; it made me feel safe when nothing made sense anymore.” Neal set the rabbit aside, with the photo albums and his baby things. “I can’t believe she kept this, all of this. That the Marshals let her take all of this stuff.”  
  
“You sure you’re all right? We can finish another day.”  
  
“No, I’m good. Just two more boxes, right? Let’s get it done.”  
  
Peter retrieved the last cartons; they were the heaviest of the lot and the ones that probably contained Neal’s mother’s papers. He was almost afraid of what they would find.  
  
He was right about the contents. The box they opened was a disorganized mess, but as they sorted through it, the papers told a sad tale of a life gone off the rails. It was filled with legal papers relating to James Bennett, copies of his indictment and his plea agreement. Letters from him to Neal’s mother, envelopes addressed to Neal, all of them routed through WitSec. Copies of insurance policies and bank statements, all in James’ name. All paid out to Neal’s mother.  
  
“I don’t want this shit. Burn it, shred it. It’s got nothing to do with me.”  
  
Peter waited for Moz to say something but the man just shifted the box to the floor and opened the last carton.  
  
Neal took a deep breath and pulled out a stack of manila envelopes. In contrast to the previous box, this one was highly organized – much like the carton of Neal’s childhood paperwork. Most of the weight, though, came from another photograph album – an overly ornate volume bound in fake leather and tarnished embossing on cover.  
  
_Felix and Veronica – Our Wedding_  
  
Peter wasn’t sure who gasped – maybe they all did.  
  
“I guess I’ve got my proof.” Neal traced the letters that spelled out the man’s name, but he didn’t open it.  
  
“You don’t want to look?”  
  
“No. Not yet.”  
  
He handed the album to Peter and opened one of the envelopes. “And this makes it official. My mother’s marriage license to Felix Turner.” Neal handed that off to him and looked at another paper. “And her divorce was final in January of 1978.” He opened another envelope. “And this makes it _really_ official. My birth certificate. I was born Neal George Turner, in March, 1977. Parents listed as Veronica Turner, _nee_ Caffrey and Felix Turner.” Neal was silent for a moment, then he asked, “What’s the date on the marriage license?”  
  
Peter checked, “October 25, 1976.”  
  
“And I was born five months later. So, they had to get married.”  
  
“Given what Ned told you, did you really think it was a love match?”  
  
Moz pounced on that. “Who’s Ned?”  
  
_Damn_. Peter forgot that Neal hadn’t told Moz about Ned and Felix.  
  
But Neal didn’t flinch. “Ned was the guy who thought I was Felix Turner’s son.”  
  
“And why wouldn’t it have been a love match?”  
  
“Because Ned was Felix’s lover.”  
  
“Ah.” Thankfully, Moz left it at that.  
  
There was one more envelope in the box, and it bore the name of a D.C. law firm. Neal struggled to pull out the mass of papers. “Shit.”  
  
“What’s the matter?”  
  
Neal wiped his mouth and handed the documents to Peter. “James adopted me.”  
  
Peter looked through them. There was correspondence between the D.C. firm and Felix Turner. The first letter was dated May, 1978 – when Neal would have been about fourteen months old – requesting that Felix consent to the termination of his parental rights and permit the adoption of the infant Neal George Turner by James Bennett. There were copies of the return correspondence and the signed forms granting consent. Peter noticed that there was little more than three months between the date of the first letter and the date of the adoption petition. Felix hadn’t put up a fight.  
  
“This means nothing, Neal.” Moz took the words right out of Peter’s mouth. “It changes nothing. You are the man you are because of the life you’ve lived. Because of your friends and the people who love you. You’re not that bastard’s son because thirty-five years ago, some judge banged his gavel and said the magic words.”  
  
“I know.” He tossed the adoption papers on top of the box with the documents about James, the ones Neal wanted to destroy. “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.”  
  
“As first said by the greatest philosopher of them all,” Moz said with no small amount of satisfaction.  
  
“Exactly.” Neal leaned over and kissed Moz on the forehead. “You know what, guys – I really am okay. Mind if I go up and take a quick shower?”  
  
Peter waved his hand in the general direction of the staircase. “Go ahead.” That suited him fine. He wanted a few minutes alone with Mozzie.  
  
He waited until he heard the water turn on, not that he really needed to make sure that Neal couldn’t overhear them. “Thanks.”  
  
“For what?”  
  
“For being here. For being Neal’s friend. I know it’s been difficult for you – with _us_.”  
  
Moz just shrugged.  
  
“We will never come between you and Neal – you know that.”  
  
“I don’t understand how you do what you do, Suit. I don’t understand how you manage to juggle your wife and Neal and keep everyone happy.”  
  
Peter thought better of making a joke about multitasking and answered Mozzie seriously. “I don’t juggle El and Neal. They are equal parts of my life; they are secure in my love and my commitment to them. It’s not your place to judge.” Peter hoped Moz would understand. As much as he worried about Moz’s occasionally pernicious influence over Neal, he hated the idea that he was coming between the two men.  
  
Moz stared at him and Peter wondered just what it was going to take to convince him that no one was cheating or being cheated upon.  
  
Moz blinked and the tension of the moment snapped. “Well, I guess I’m done here.” He got up, hefted the box he’d promise to take. “Tell Neal I’ll see him next week, about the thing.”  
  
“The thing? What thing?” Peter got mildly worried.  
  
“He’ll know what I’m talking about. And my best to Mrs. Suit when you see her. Tell her that I’ve got a new recipe for sesame seaweed salad that she might want to try.”  
  
Peter tried not to gag at the thought. “I’ll be sure to let her know.”  
  
“You do that.” Moz looked at the bottle of wine, still opened and still mostly full. “I guess it would be too much to ask if you’d hold onto that for me?"  
  
“Not a problem.”  
  
“Very well.” Moz went over to the door and stared at it, then glared at him.  
  
Peter sighed. “I’ll get that for you.”  
  
Moz made it down to the street before turning back to him. “Don’t forget to tell El about the recipe.”  
  
“No, I won’t.” Peter closed the door and shook his head. Of all the things…  
  
“You won’t what?” Neal was coming down the stairs.  
  
“Believe me, you don’t want to know.” He reached for Neal, drawing him close and kissing him. “I’m very proud of you.”  
  
Neal kissed him back and Peter could taste his passion, his love. “Why are you proud of me?”  
  
“You know – for going through everything.” Peter glanced over at the dining room, where the remnants of a life were neatly piled. “For dealing with this like a man.”  
  
“A man?” Neal raised an eyebrow.  
  
“An adult.”  
  
They went into the living room and Neal flopped onto the couch. Satchmo lumbered up to him and Peter sat down next to Neal. The dog gave him the stink eye and wedged himself between the two of them, resting his chin on Neal’s knee.  
  
“I’m really okay, Peter. I’ve lost nothing, and maybe I’ve gained a little clarity.”  
  
“Clarity?” That surprised him. It seemed to Peter that Neal’s origins were more opaque than ever.  
  
“My mother wasn’t … present. She was depressed, emotionally absent most of the time. She loved me but she could never escape her own sadness. I always thought it was because she was mourning my father – excuse me, the man I’d thought was my father. When I was seventeen, I learned that James Bennett wasn’t dead and my mother knew that all along. Her sadness seemed a lie, a terrible and selfish weakness. I felt cheated.”  
  
“Neal – ”  
  
“Why do you think I didn’t ever try to see her for twenty years? I resented her so much. For the lies, for everything.” Neal’s hand shook as he stroked Satchmo’s head.  
  
Peter understood.  
  
“How many times have you called me Peter Pan – the boy who never grew up? Well, I didn’t – I never grew out of my anger and resentment.”  
  
“I’m sorry – I didn’t know.”  
  
Neal stopped stroking Satchmo and wove his fingers through Peter’s hand. “But now I understand. My mother suffered more than anyone. She married a man because she had to, a man who couldn’t love her. A man who walked away from her and never looked back. She must have thought that she was the luckiest woman in the world when she found James. Not only did he love her, he loved her baby enough to want to give him his name. But that didn’t last either. How long before James went on the take? Before he got greedy and vicious and cruel? How long before her world was destroyed again? She was cut off from almost everyone – no family, no friends except Ellen. And Ellen was James’ partner – another reminder of a life gone wrong.”  
  
Peter felt helpless; there was little he could offer other than comfort. “You can’t change the past, Neal.”  
  
“I know that. I can’t get my childhood back and I can’t have my mother back. I don’t know if it was chemistry or circumstances or a combination of both, but my mother was dealt a bad hand and never recovered from the blows. I wish I could have been a better son, I could have tried just a little harder to understand.”  
  
“Are you going to keep blaming yourself?”  
  
“Guilt is inevitable, isn’t it?”  
  
“Yes. And a little guilt is healthy. It reminds us that there are always consequences. Just as long as you don’t let it eat you alive.”  
  
Neal squeezed his hand. “And if I start going down that path, I’ve got people who’ll keep me from spiraling too deep into the dark places, right?”  
  
Peter lifted Neal’s hand and pressed a kiss on it, enjoying the strong muscle and bone, the heat and warmth of Neal’s skin. “You have people who love you, who care about you. You have us, your family.”  
  
  


  
  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
It took Neal the better part of a month before he could bring himself to look at the photograph albums. First was the oldest volume and there were no ghosts amongst the pictures of his mother as a young child, a teenager, a woman getting ready to step into adulthood. And there were photos of his grandparents – they looked happy and prosperous. One picture was of a man in a business suit standing next to a gigantic Chevrolet, smiling with the pride of ownership. Another picture, dated 1955, showed a woman holding an infant – his mother – in front of a big brick house.  
  
It seemed that his mother was an only child, but she had friends and a loving family and lived an ordinary life of a girl growing up in a turbulent time in America. Neal took comfort in those images. It seemed that his mother didn’t want for anything – materially or emotionally. Of course, he knew that static pictures couldn’t tell a complete story and who knew what was lurking in the shadows, but on the face of things – it all looked normal.  
  
He removed one photograph from the book and used it as the basis for a sketch. His mother, age fifteen, playing the piano. This was how he preferred to remember her.  
  
There were some ghosts in the second album, but they were now familiar ones. His own childhood. Neal smiled at some of the pictures of him – he’d have to show these to Peter and Elizabeth, especially the ones of him at two months old – fat and naked on some fake bearskin rug.  
  
The album seemed to chronicle most every waking moment of his life from the time he was born until he was about a year old. In many of the pictures, he was cradled in his mother’s arms, in his maternal grandparents’ arms. And in one or two, he might have been held in his father’s arms, but the heads on those photos had been carefully cut off.  
  
He didn’t blame his mother for that vandalism. He might have done the same in her place.  
  
There were no pictures of James in either of these albums, nor in the framed photographs she’d had in her room at the nursing home. For a moment, Neal regretted telling Peter and Moz that the box of papers with James’ criminal history should be destroyed. There might have been something there, maybe the one picture he remembered, of his father – no, James – in his dress blue uniform. And then he discarded that regret. He had no need of any memories of James Bennett. Whatever good deed he’d done by adopting him was far outweighed by the damage he caused to the lives of everyone who had had the misfortune to care about him.  
  
The last photograph album – the one documenting his mother’s disastrous wedding to his biological father – was the one he most dreaded looking at. The one he couldn’t bring himself to even open.  
  
The picture Peter had shown him, that long-ago June evening, was of a man happy and in love. And in a way, that man was as much of a liar as James Bennett and his lies had just as many consequences.  
  
He wondered if his mother had known about Felix’s sexuality when she’d married him, if he’d told her the truth. Maybe she thought she could change him. After all, he’d had sex with her, he’d impregnated her. Maybe she was willing to take that chance.  
  
Neal looked at the album but didn’t open it. He couldn’t bring himself to look and see a version of the truth he could never really understand.  
  
The book sat on his dining room table for weeks. Peter would see it and he wouldn’t comment. Moz would carefully push it out of the way. June never asked.  
  
And Neal couldn’t bring himself to take that final step.  
  
A few days before Thanksgiving, Elizabeth stopped by unexpectedly. She brought pie and a six-pack of apple ale, an unexpected combination.  
  
“I wasn’t expecting to see you until Thursday afternoon.” He was celebrating the holiday with Peter and Elizabeth, of course. Moz was invited but he usually volunteered at a homeless shelter for the day. He might, though, stop by for dessert. And wine.  
  
“I thought you’d like a little company. Peter said you had a head cold and had cancelled all of your appointments this week.”  
  
“There weren’t that many, and yes – a sinus infection. Which is why you shouldn’t be here either.”  
  
El waived aside his objections. “I’m married to a Burke; therefore I’m invulnerable to germs.”  
  
Neal chuckled at her illogic. “I seem to recall an episode where Peter was particularly sick and then so were you.”  
  
El laughed, too. “It’s okay. I’ve been taking Mozzie’s bee pollen concoction, so I should be fine.”  
  
“Well, if you want to risk it, I’m happy for the company. And the pie. The apple ale, though – that I’m going to pass on.”  
  
“More for me, then.” Neal watched, bemused, as El made herself at home in his kitchen, serving them both a generous slice of pie and popping the top on a bottle. He brewed a cup of tea and sat down at the table, across from Elizabeth. He loved this woman. Not like he loved Kate, not like he thought he loved Rebecca. No – his feelings weren’t romantic. They were deeper, finer, less easy to categorize. She was more than just a beloved part of Peter’s life. She was someone he loved for herself. He sighed with happiness at the realization.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Nothing.”  
  
“Come on, what are you thinking?”  
  
“How much I love you.”  
  
Her cheeks flushed. “Neal – ”  
  
“Oh, no, not like that.”  
  
She tilted her head and gave him a curious look. “Oh? Then how?”  
  
“I know I probably sound ridiculous, but I love you like I love the salt in my food. You give my life meaning, Elizabeth Burke. You bring me gelato and pie and weird beer and always tell me when I’m about to do something stupid. You make me happy.”  
  
She leaned over and kissed him. “I love you, Neal Caffrey. You bring chaos and wine and excitement into my life. And you make me happy, too.”  
  
Neal wondered how he managed to have this woman love him. To have this _person_ love him, after all his sins, his crimes. Peter’s love was different – that was a relationship forged in mutual mistrust and healthy admiration. Elizabeth had no reason to love him, but she gave him her trust and allowed him to share the greatest part of her life.  
  
“What’s this?” She pulled his parents' wedding album towards her and looked at the cover. “Ah.”  
  
“Yeah, _ah_.”  
  
“Have you looked at it yet?”  
  
He shook his head. “I can’t bring myself to take this last step.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
He sighed. “I don’t know. I have all the proof I need – my birth certificate. My _real_ one. I’ve seen the adoption papers. This man – Felix – didn’t want me. He didn’t fight for his right to be a father. He walked out and never looked back.”  
  
“Or maybe he didn’t want to tear your life apart. It seems like your mother married James soon after she got divorced. Right afterwards.”  
  
“Peter told you?”  
  
“And I looked at the dates on the legal paperwork for your adoption.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because I was curious and because I didn’t want to ask you. It’s something that bothers you and I didn’t see any reason why I needed to cause you pain when the documents were sitting in a box in the basement.”  
  
“I should have figured that Peter wouldn’t shred them so quickly.” He swallowed. “Did you find anything interesting?”  
  
“It’s possible that your mother knew James while she was still married to your father.”  
  
“That she cheated on him?”  
  
“Or that she realized that her marriage to Felix wasn’t much of a partnership and looked for happiness elsewhere.”  
  
Neal tried to accept that.  
  
“And consider this – maybe your father figured that you’d be happier with a man who wanted to be a father. He had to figure that James – a police officer – could give you a good life. Why not think of it that way? Felix Turner was gay and closeted and probably miserable living a lie. He left to find a life where he could be happy. Why shouldn’t he have wanted the same thing for your mother? For you?”  
  
“I think you love happy endings, El. I think you see the best in people, even strangers who have been dead for three decades.”  
  
“And what’s wrong with that?”  
  
“Nothing.” Neal ran his fingers over the album cover. “Will you look at this with me?”  
  
“Of course.” Elizabeth moved around the table and sat down next to him. Together, they opened the photo album.  
  
The first page was kind of anti-climactic, merely a copy of the wedding invitation. “I guess I now know where my middle name came from.” His maternal grandfather was George Caffrey and his maternal grandmother was Dorothy. There was no mention of Felix’s parents, which wasn’t uncommon, especially if they weren’t financially contributing to the wedding.  
  
“Your mom never told you?” El asked gently.  
  
“No, she didn’t like to talk about the past or her family.” Neal didn’t say, _She didn’t like to talk about anything._. He took a deep breath and turned the page. “And there it is, the last mystery revealed.”  
  
“Sweetie.” El wrapped an arm around him and hugged him.  
  
“I really do look like him, don’t I?”  
  
“Yes – the resemblance is startling. You could almost be twins.”  
  
The photograph was almost a cliché of the 1970s. His mother in a wedding gown that screamed “Little House on the Prairie” chic, her dark hair feathered and teased. Felix – because it was still hard to think of this man as his father – wearing a dark suit. “Thank god, I was afraid his hair would be permed, he’d have a mustache and sideburns, and be wearing a powder blue tuxedo.”  
  
El laughed, “Well, there’s a bit of a mullet going on there …”  
  
Neal stared at the picture, trying to divine their thoughts. They were in a very traditional pose, Felix behind his mother, cupping her elbows. They were staring into the camera, smiling. It was hard to read anything from their expressions. If he didn’t know what came next, he’d have to say that they both looked happy.  
  
The album was a testament to every wedding photographer’s cliché. A portrait of his mother and his grandmother in front of a mirror. His mother pinning a white rose onto his grandfather’s lapel. There were photographs of his maternal grandparents with Felix, but there were none of Felix and his own parents and Neal had to wonder at that.  
  
His mother had plenty of bridesmaids – some of the faces were familiar from the family photo album he’d already looked through. Felix’s groomsmen were a motley sort, most sporting the dreaded mustaches and perms and serious mullets. One of the men looked out of place – or at least his expression was. He wasn’t precisely scowling, but he was clearly unhappy.  
  
“Is that James?” Elizabeth tapped a fingernail on that man.  
  
The question startled Neal. Of all the things he was expecting to find in this photo album, James Bennett’s face was not on the list. The face was small and there was a lot of hair. “Hold on.” Neal fetched a magnifying glass from the worktable and peered at the man in question. With no small amount of relief, he noted, “No, thank god. This guy’s eyes are definitely dark brown.”  
  
“That would have been something.”  
  
“I don’t even want to think about it.”  
  
“Yeah.” Elizabeth sighed. “That might just be too much of a coincidence.”  
  
There were a dozen more posed photographs and then the candid shots. The family arriving at the church, the ceremony, leaving the church. Pictures of happy people at the reception, laughing and dancing and cutting the wedding cake. Everything was glossy and polished and perfect.  
  
All so banal. So ordinary. No secrets to be discovered. At least not until the very end. Between the last page and the back cover, there was a plain white envelope and Neal’s hands shook as he opened it and pulled out more pictures.  
  
He looked at them and it finally hit him. The truth that he’d been chasing since he’d learned that he wasn’t James’ son. His mother had loved Felix Turner.  
  
Neal spread out the photographs on the table and stared at them. They weren’t from his parents' wedding, but from when he’d been born. These were the pieces of the photographs that his mother had cut apart, where she’d excised Felix from the history of her baby’s life.  
  
“She couldn’t bear to get rid of them. Of him. She kept this for thirty years – the record of a failed marriage through everything she’d been through. She kept him. Despite everything, she loved him.”  
  
He got to his feet, feeling like he’d just come through a long and terrible illness, and made his way over to the bookcase where he’d stored the album with his baby pictures. El took that book from him and started going through it, finding the pages with the mutilated photographs.  
  
“Here.” She laid a piece – of Felix looking down at something – on top of a picture of him as a newborn and the world snapped into focus. There was so much love and adoration in Felix’s face, love for the child in his arms. For _him_.  
  
El found the missing piece of another picture. Felix sitting on his mother’s bed, his arms around her as she held her baby. His father’s smile was gentle, his eyes filled with wonder and joy. Despite everything else, he’d created this life and in this moment, he was happy.  
  
Neal closed his eyes. It hurt too much. From the time he was old enough to understand that he didn’t have a father, he’d begged his mother, he’d begged Ellen for stories about the man. His mother, of course, was vague. His daddy had been a hero and he died. Ellen painted a picture of a man larger than life, at least until she couldn’t let him go on believing those lies. Neal had to wonder if she even knew the truth – that James wasn’t his real father.  
  
Even after his world had fractured, he never stopped longing for knowledge, for understanding about the man who fathered him. And what he found were more lies and betrayals, and they nearly destroyed him. But he survived and although he’d messed everything up, the people he loved forgave him, gave him another chance. More than another chance. They’d opened their lives to him and loved him.  
  
And still, there was another truth out there. One he only had fragments of. Pictures, a handful of official documents. A few years’ worth of impersonal prose about subjects that meant nothing.  
  
“I think you need to talk to him, Neal. Maybe he can help fit in the missing pieces. Help you understand.”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“Ned Weeks – the man your father loved.”  
  
It made sense, but the idea terrified him.  
  


__________________

  
  
  
  
It was a week before Christmas and Ned was trying to remember why he hated summer so much. New York in December wasn’t a pleasant place to be when you were old and sick and lonely.  
  
He looked at the electric menorah that was still perched on the window sill; the orange light bulb for the fourth night was flickering erratically. Chanukah had been over for a week. It annoyed him, but not enough to make him get up and find the box and put the damned thing away. He had to wonder if he’d live to use it another year.  
  
Another year. That’s all that Felix had asked for. To live another year. Thirty years ago, he wanted to live another year and he didn’t get that wish. There were times – too many times – that Ned wished he could have crawled into the grave with Felix and shared the rot.  
  
But he didn’t. He manned the ramparts, waved the flags, excoriated the weak and the cowardly and the promiscuous and tried – with some success – to change the world.  
  
And now the world seemed to be changing without him. The drugs they’d hoped for back then – in those terrible days – were out there. Take a pill every day and fuck whoever you want, however you want.  
  
The thought disgusted him. All that he’d worked for, to be undone.  
  
Or maybe he was just old and blind and too narrow minded. Someone – a well-educated, pompous twink – once called him the gay Jonathan Edwards, comparing his speeches to the Puritan preacher’s _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_.  
  
He’d told the twerp to fuck off, but he’d been secretly pleased. Not that he liked being compared to a Christian theologian, of all things, but that his own words had such power.  
  
It was raining outside – only four in the afternoon, but so dark that it seemed like it was closer to midnight. That’s December in New York for you. He’d argued with his brother yesterday – or was it this morning? Ben wanted him to come down to his place in the Keys for the rest of the winter. It was warm and sunny, and wouldn’t it be a hell of a lot nicer to spend time with family?  
  
Part of him wanted to say yes, part of him wanted to get on the plane that Ben would charter for him. He wanted the sun and the warmth and maybe one more year with people who cared about him.  
  
But he couldn’t bring himself to give in, to say yes. He was too fucking stubborn. So he argued with Ben instead and hung up the phone in anger. He might be seventy-six, Ben might be nearly eighty-eight, but some things never changed. Or maybe they did. He sent Ben a text, wishing him a happy New Year and maybe he’d come down in a few weeks. Not for the whole winter, but for a little while.  
  
Ben replied, saying that would be very nice.  
  
Ned sighed and watched the rain trickle down the window, the street lights reflected in the tiny droplets. He felt like something out of an old Simon and Garfunkel song. The lyrics teased at his memories –  
  
_I hear the drizzle of the rain  
Like a memory it falls  
Soft and warm continuing  
Tapping on my roof and walls._  
  
Which one was it? _Kathy’s Song_ or _For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her_?  
  
Ned was actually curious enough to get up from his armchair and head over to his record collection. He was a dinosaur in more ways than one – refusing to give up on vinyl. It would all go in the trash when he died. But he’d be dead, so what the hell did it matter anyway?  
  
He pulled out an ancient copy of _Sounds of Silence_ and his hands were shaking. In the dark days and months and years after Felix had died, before he became ill, he had listened to this album incessantly – it had become the soundtrack to his life. He kept trying to find some meaning in the lyrics, a surcease to his grief in the poetry of desperate alienation.  
  
But he found nothing to ease the pain and finally stopped listening. As he dropped the needle onto the record – the fourth track, Ned realized that it was close to twenty-five years since he’d put this album on the turntable.  
  
The once-familiar strains of a solo guitar leading into Paul Simon’s achingly lonely voice confirmed his memory…  
  
_And a song I was writing is left undone  
I don't know why I spend my time  
Writing songs I can't believe  
With words that tear and strain to rhyme  
  
And so you see I have come to doubt  
All that I once held as true  
I stand alone without beliefs  
The only truth I know is you  
  
And as I watch the drops of rain  
Weave their weary paths and die  
I know that I am like the rain  
There but for the grace of you go I_  
  
As the guitar was reaching for the final crescendo, his cellphone rang – loud and obnoxious – breaking the peace he had almost found.  
  
He didn’t recognize the number, but it was local, from 212 – a rarity these days. The phone shrilled again and Ned debated ignoring the call. But he didn’t.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
_“Is this Ned Weeks?"_  
  
The voice was vaguely familiar.  
  
_“I don’t know if you remember me – my name is Peter Burke. We met in late June in a -”_  
  
“Coffee shop on Barrow Street. In the West Village. I’m old but I’m not senile.”  
  
The man on the other end let out a deep sigh. _“Then I guess you remember my friend, Neal?"_  
  
Yes, oh god, yes – how could he forget? Ned managed to breathe.  
  
_“Mr. Weeks? Ned?"_  
  
He squeezed out a single syllable. “Yes. Of course.”  
  
_“He’d like to see you. Would that be possible?”_  
  
“Why?” Ned closed his eyes and remembered a face – so familiar, too familiar – beautiful and strange in its perfection. “After all these months, why?”  
  
_“It’s complicated."_  
  
“So’s life.” An almost visceral need to pick a fight rose in his gut. “Why can’t you tell me?”  
  
_“Because it’s not my story to tell, that’s why.”_  
  
He could hear Burke striving for patience. People tended to need to do that around him. “But your ‘friend’ isn’t related to … ” Ned paused before saying that name. “Felix. He’s not my lover’s son.”  
  
This time it was Burke with the telling pause.  
  
“He is Felix’s boy?”  
  
_“Will you talk with him?”_  
  
Ned collapsed into his chair. How could he even think of saying no? “When?”  
  
_“Neal will met with you whenever you want to see him.”_  
  
His heart fluttered in uncertainty, in joy. _Now?_ He strove for a level of detachment. “Tomorrow afternoon? Maybe around two?” He’d have taken his meds and the nausea would have passed by then.  
  
_“Hold on.”_ He heard voices, an indistinct conversation, before Burke came back. _“Two o’clock is fine. Where?”_  
  
“My apartment will be fine.”  
  
_“The address?”_  
  
“It’s the same one I’ve been living in for over forty years. I’m sure the address is in your files.” Despite everything, Ned felt himself being difficult. It was a reflex and he couldn’t help himself.  
  
And Burke didn’t seem to have any compunction about calling him on it. _“Stop being such a jackass and give me your address.”_  
  
Ned laughed. “54 Carmine Street, Apartment 5C.”  
  
_“Neal will be there – tomorrow at two.”_  
  
“Okay.”  
  
Ned barely listened as Burke made a few polite comments, thanked him and hung up. He couldn’t quite believe it. Maybe he’d wake up and realize that the whole thing had been a dream.  
  
In the background, Paul and Art were noodling something in a minor key that made no sense at all. The album ended and the turntable clicked off. The abrupt silence was startling.  
  
All Ned could think was that Felix was coming back to him.  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  


  
  
  
  
“Are you sure you’re up to doing this? I’ll call Weeks and tell him you couldn’t make it.”  
  
Peter was so earnest, so damn helpful, offering him a way out. He knew how much he was dreading this meeting. Instead of answering, Neal fiddled with a stack of photographs – ones he’d removed from that wedding album and had reproduced. He had no idea Ned Weeks would want anything from Felix’s life before they’d met. And he took a bigger risk by including copies of the photographs that his mother had cut up, ones he’d repaired. He put the photographs into a manila envelope.  
  
“Neal?”  
  
“No. It’s okay. I need to do this.” He did. Ned Weeks was the only person alive who really knew his father. He’d spent the last few weeks researching the man. Reading the file Peter had gotten from the FBI, hundreds of news articles about him over the last three decades, his books and plays, helped form a picture of a man who knew how to do one thing and do it well – he knew how to fight.  
  
He hoped he was a man who also knew how to love.  
  
“What’s that?” Peter pointed to a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. “A Christmas present?”  
  
Neal prevaricated. “Ned Weeks is Jewish.”  
  
“You know what I meant.”  
  
He sighed. “It’s the Rembrandt I did – the one from last summer.”  
  
“Old Man in Red.”  
  
“Yeah. I thought maybe … ”  
  
“It’s a nice gift. Did you leave the glasses on?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“So it’s an original Neal Caffrey.”  
  
“I wouldn’t say that.”  
  
“No one says that _L.H.O.O.Q._ isn’t an original Duchamp.”  
  
“Peter, I’m impressed – I didn’t think modern art was your forte. And besides, I’m no Marcel Duchamp.”  
  
“No, you don’t sign a urinal, hang it on a wall, and call it ‘Fountain’. You have better taste than that.”  
  
“No, what I mean is that I don’t have an ounce of Duchamp’s creativity, Peter. I replicate, I don’t create.” This was an old argument. And a good distraction. He put the photos and the wrapped painting into a canvas bag. The few other items he needed were already in the bag. “I’m ready.”  
  
“No – I think you need this.” Peter handed him his coat.  
  
“Ah, right.” He put it on and again proclaimed his readiness.  
  
Peter smiled and followed him out of the apartment.  
  
They were on the Henry Hudson Parkway, just south of the Boat Basin before Neal spoke. “You didn’t have to take the day off, you know. I think I could have managed to find my way downtown.”  
  
“I know – but I didn’t want you to do this all by yourself.”  
  
Neal could hear the whole ‘we are a family’ speech hanging in the air. “Thank you. But I want to see him by myself.”  
  
“I know. I’ll wait for you in the car.”  
  
“Could be a while.”  
  
“I don’t mind. One of the perks of being ASAC; I don’t really need to account for every minute of my day. I’ve got a stack of year-end reports to wade through. I can do them in the comfort of my car just as easily as I could if I was sitting at my desk. Besides, someone made a recording of Derek Jeter’s last game for me. I never get tired of listening to that.”  
  
Neal had given that to him a few weeks ago, knowing how much he’d enjoy listening to the Captain’s last triumphant game over and over again.  
  
“You sure?”  
  
Peter sighed, but there was no annoyance in his exhalation. “Yes, Neal. I’m sure.”  
  
Neal sank back into silence, wondering and worrying about this meeting. Ned Weeks wasn’t, by even the kindest accounts, a nice man. A recent New York Times profile, published to coincide with editorials about strides made in AIDS research and the availability of prophylactic antiretroviral drugs, noted how little he’d mellowed, despite decades of serious illness. The Times article pointed out that two years ago, Weeks had started a very public feud with a one-time close friend because the man had refused to portray a historic figure as gay, even though the evidence that he was gay was very scant and suspect.  
  
The internal tension was too much and Neal couldn’t stop himself from blurting out, “Do you think he’ll like me?”  
  
“Why wouldn’t he?”  
  
Neal slumped down in the seat, feeling like a twelve year-old. “Dunno – the prison record maybe?”  
  
Peter cut across traffic, ignoring the angry horns blasting at him, and turned onto Ludlow Street. “You’ve never been ashamed of who you are, why start now?”  
  
That wasn’t quite true. Neal remembered a woman who once called herself Rebecca and looked at him like the sun rose and set in his eyes.  
  
“Felix Turner was your biological father, nothing more. He tried to give you a good life. You are the sum of your experiences, your choices, not your biology. No one has the right to judge you for that.”  
  
“Well, no one except a jury of my peers and a man in a robe with a gavel.” Neal tried to inject a little levity.  
  
Peter laughed and it helped. “Well, that is true. But you don’t have to impress Ned – he’s just a man.”  
  
“Who knew my real father. Who loved him.”  
  
Peter turned onto Carmine Street and found a spot a few doors down from Neal’s destination. When Neal didn’t make a move to get out of the car, Peter again offered him a way out, “If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to.”  
  
“No. Like I said, I need to do this. I _want_ to do this. You understand, right?”  
  
“Of course I do.”  
  
Neal leaned across the console and kissed Peter. “I love you.”  
  
He felt Peter’s smile under his lips. “I love you, too.”  
  
Neal took a deep breath and got out of the car, then grabbed his bag from the back seat. He looked up at the sky, a deep, steely gray. Three days before Christmas and he found himself hoping for snow.  
  


  
  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
Ned was sure he was going to be sick. It wasn’t the nausea from his pills, but the anxiety. He didn’t sleep last night, not that he slept well under ordinary circumstances – but last night was worse. This morning, the cleaning lady who had worked for him for almost twenty years nearly quit when he called her a rather unspeakable name because she wasn’t getting everything perfect.  
  
He kept telling himself that Neal Caffrey _wasn’t_ Felix. That he wasn’t the reincarnation of the man he’d loved and lost. That this person would have no idea who Felix was and what he had meant to him. And as many times as he tried to convince himself of that truth, the more he wanted to believe otherwise.  
  
It was also possible that Neal Caffrey would be a total jackass. But Ned really didn’t think so – if their first encounter at that coffee shop was anything to go by. Until he had wigged out and starting demanding to know if Felix was his father, the man had been deeply concerned about the welfare of stranger. Not typical behavior of any of the jackasses he’d known throughout his life.  
  
And he’d known quite a few of them.  
  
At noon, he was shaking so badly he’d dropped the glass of water he needed to take his medication. At least it was plastic and it landed in the sink. At one, he’d changed his shirt for the fourth time. At one-thirty, he’d almost called Burke and told him to forget the whole thing – maybe another day, when he wasn’t dying.  
  
But he looked at the framed picture of Felix, happy and healthy and smiling into the camera, and remembered that he wasn’t a god-damned fucking coward after all.  
  
Five minutes before the hour, he called down to the doorman and told him that when Neal Caffrey arrived, to let him go right up. A minute later, he called back and said, no – call him first. He might not be a coward, but apparently he was a dithering faggot.  
  
At one minute past two, and exhausted from pacing the length of the small hallway between his front door and his living room, the phone rang and Ned lunged for it.  
  
“Yes, yes – please send Mr. Caffrey up. He’s expected.” _No shit, didn’t you just tell the idiot that you were expecting him?_  
  
He took a few deep breaths, trying to control his excitement, his anxiety, his terror. This all felt terribly familiar, too much like the night he was waiting for Felix to show up on their first date. He needed to remember that this man probably didn’t give a damn about the things he cared about, he had to control his need to harangue and insist and demand.  
  
And he got nowhere with that effort when the doorbell rang. Ned’s hands shook as he undid the locks, and for a moment, his vision tunneled into a single point – like he was looking through a peephole, but he finally got the door opened and he didn’t faint. There was something to be said for small triumphs.  
  
When he let himself think about the encounter in that coffee shop, Ned had told himself that the the resemblance between Felix and Neal Caffrey was merely superficial, coincidence. Dark hair, good bones, blue eyes, strong brow – that was it. It was how he survived without breaking down. Looking at Neal Caffrey now, he could see just how badly he’d deluded himself. Neal Caffrey looked too much like Felix Turner to be coincidence.  
  
He stood there and stared at the man on the other side of the threshold, frozen by memory, by grief, by love and fear and longing.  
  
“May I come in?”  
  
Ned swallowed all of those emotions and shuffled back. He managed to get out a single word. “Please.”  
  
Not-Felix – no – Neal, was carrying a large canvas bag, which he set down by the door as he rid himself of his hat and coat. Ned was curious about the bag and the item wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. It seemed oddly old-fashioned, much like the man’s hat and suit.  
  
Ned went into his living room and gestured for Neal to take a seat.  
  
“Coffee? Tea? Something stronger?”  
  
“No, thank you – I’m okay. But don’t let me stop you if you want something.”  
  
Most of the time, Ned didn’t miss drinking – he’d spent too much of his childhood avoiding his useless father’s fists and rants after he’d spent the evening drowning his incompetencies in whatever liquor he could find. He hadn’t been a tea-totaler as an adult – a healthy adult – but now, with his liver so heavily compromised, alcohol was pure poison. At this moment, though, he could have used something to steady his nerves. Something to give him back his balls.  
  
Instead, he lowered him ass carefully into a chair across from Neal Caffrey and stared at him. He might not have his balls, but he could pretend that he did. “Why the fuck did you want to see me?” Ned jutted out his chin, all but challenging the man to slug him.  
  
Caffrey, however, didn’t rise to the bait. He just let out a gentle, almost sad sigh. “You loved my father. You knew him better than any other person alive.”  
  
Those simple words broke all of Ned’s pretenses; they shattered the anger that had been his best defense against the life he’d suffered through. “Felix was your father, then.”  
  
Caffrey – no, Neal – nodded. “Yeah.” His lips twisted into a rueful smile, an expression that Ned hadn’t seen for thirty years.  
  
“But I thought you said that you father had DNA tests done?” He remembered the disgust on Neal’s face when he’d mentioned that.  
  
“It’s complicated.”  
  
“That’s what your friend Peter said. And you know what, just being alive is complicated.”  
  
Neal chuckled. “I know, all too well.” He looked at his hands for a moment. “Maybe a cup of tea might help the story go down a little better.”  
  
Ned figured Neal for a coffee drinker, but he also could see that the tea was more for him than for any real desire on Neal’s part for something to drink. Ned fussed his way through the process of making the tea and then stared at the tray with the two mugs and a plate of cookies and realized that there was no way he’d be able to carry it out of the kitchen.  
  
Neal, however, was apparently psychic. He came into the kitchen and just said, “Let me take that.”  
  
“I hate being so fucking old.”  
  
Neal set the tray on the table and smiled. “That’s your favorite word, isn’t it?”  
  
“What, old?”  
  
“No – Fuck. Fucking. You use it a lot.”  
  
Ned shrugged and sat down. “I’m old. I’m entitled to use whatever _fucking_ words I want to use.”  
  
“Except you used it a lot when you were young – younger.”  
  
That startled Ned. “How do you know?”  
  
“I’ve read some of your plays, and a lot of your speeches, too.”  
  
“Why? Why read them?”  
  
“Why not? I wanted to understand you.”  
  
“And what about my FBI file – I’m sure your _friend_ supplied you with a copy.”  
  
Neal’s eyes darkened with anger, but Ned wasn’t sure where that anger was directed. “Yes. _Peter_ made a request – as a private citizen – for a copy. It wasn’t pleasant reading.”  
  
“I’m sure it wasn’t.” Ned itched to see it. He briefly entertained the idea of asking Neal if he could have a copy, then discarded it. He could always have Ben get it for him.  
  
Neal poured tea for them and Ned fixed his with just enough sugar to put a diabetic into a coma. Neal drank his black.  
  
“So – you said the story’s complicated. I’ve made us tea. Anymore distractions before you tell me the pitiful story of your misbegotten childhood?”  
  
Neal paled and this time, Ned was certain the anger was directed at him. “You’re a fucking asshole, Ned Weeks.”  
  
“That’s old news. So, are you going to leave in a state of high dudgeon or are you going to spill.” Ned kept attacking. It was less shaming than breaking down and begging.  
  
Neal stared at him and kept silent. Once upon a time, Ned might have been able to match that glare, but he broke first. “Sorry.”  
  
Neal nodded his head, graciously accepting the apology. “Last June, when we met, you asked me if my father was Felix Turner. I told you, no – and that I had the DNA test to prove it. That wasn’t quite the truth.”  
  
“What – the DNA test was wrong?”  
  
“No – the DNA test didn’t prove any kinship between me and the man I thought was my father.” Neal made a face. “No – that’s not explaining things properly. I need to start at the beginning.”  
  
Ned wasn’t sure what he expected to hear, but the story that Neal told was so bizarrely improbable it had to be true.  
  
“From the time I was a little boy, my mother told me that my father was a cop and that he’d died a hero. When I was seventeen, and getting ready to apply to the police academy – because I wanted to be just like my hero daddy – my father’s former partner, a woman who had helped raise me, told me the truth. That my father wasn’t a hero, that he was a dirty cop and he might have been a murderer. And that he wasn’t dead.  
  
“A few years ago, Peter encouraged me to try to find out the truth about my father.”  
  
Ned wanted to interrupt, to get more details about Neal’s life between discovering a version of the truth about his so-called father and when _Peter_ told him he needed to find what really happened, but he managed to keep a tight rein on his tongue. For once. “And he used his FBI resources to open a can of worms?”  
  
“No. I contacted my father’s old partner – and she reached out to someone. And that’s what opened the can of worms.”  
  
Ned listened patiently, letting Neal fill in the details of how – unknowingly – he’d spent his childhood in witness protection because the man he’d grown up believing was his father had turned state’s evidence against the crime family he’d been working for.  
  
Finally, Ned couldn’t stop himself from asking, “So – what about the DNA test?”  
  
“Ellen – my father’s former partner – had reached out to another cop. Someone she said she’d talked with over the years about my father, someone who might have had the truth about him. Ellen hadn’t wanted to believe that my father was a cop-killer and this guy apparently shared her belief. Somehow, the people who my father – ” Neal cut himself off. “No, not my father – James Bennett. You’ll have to forgive me if I keep misspeaking. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the reality of my real paternity.”  
  
Ned nodded and Neal continued. “Ellen was murdered by the people that James Bennett helped put in prison, even though she was still in witness protection. But as she was dying, she told me that I should trust the cop she’d contacted – the man she called ‘Sam Phelps’.”  
  
“Was he the one who tipped off her murderers?”  
  
Neal didn’t say anything for a moment. “The thought had crossed my mind more than once.”  
  
“Who was this guy? Did he know James?” Ned almost said ‘your father.’  
  
“No – he _was_ James Bennett.”  
  
Ned thought he should have seen that coming from a mile out.  
  
“A few weeks after I finally met Sam, I found out that the D.C. cop named ‘Sam Phelps’ had died of a heart attack on his fishing boat in the Florida Keys a few years before. I needed to know who this guy was, so I managed to get a sample of his blood. Peter got the DNA test results.”  
  
“And they were a match for James Bennett, right?” Ned was beginning to see the picture forming.  
  
“Yes, and I drew the obvious conclusion – that James Bennett was my father. I kept on believing that until our chance meeting last June.”  
  
“But he wasn’t? Did the lab make a mistake? Was Bennett related to Felix?”  
  
“No, no and no. He was James Bennett, the lab didn’t make a mistake, and he wasn’t related to Felix Turner.” Neal paused and took a sip of the probably cold tea. “You have to understand, there were a lot of things going on at that time. It was a little crazy when Peter got the report. He just saw that it said the blood tested was a match for James Bennett. We both made assumptions and never questioned them. It never occurred to him that the lab had run a kinship analysis with my DNA. James had been in prison before he testified, and his DNA was in the system. Not only was the DNA test based on samples in the Federal database, but it stated that a kinship analysis determined that there was no match for any other DNA in the database. Sam Phelps was James Bennett, but James Bennett wasn’t my biological father.”  
  
A question teased at Ned’s brain, but he was too focused on Neal’s story to let it fully form. “And how did you find this out?”  
  
“The day we met – after Peter left you, he finally read the full report and then he told me.”  
  
“How did you feel when you found out?” Ned had despised his own father and would have been thrilled to learn that his paternity was in question. And apparently Neal felt the same.  
  
“About finding out that James wasn’t my father? Relieved. He was a weak man who did terrible things and lied to a lot of people who cared about him.” Neal paused and gave him a curious look. “Do you remember when a U.S. Senator was shot during an FBI investigation in the Empire State Building?”  
  
“Vaguely – I might have been in the hospital when that happened.”  
  
“The senator had once been James’ precinct captain – he had been just as dirty. I’m not going to bore you with the details – ”  
  
“Oh, believe me – you’re not boring me.”  
  
Neal shook his head. “They aren’t relevant. What’s really relevant is that James shot the senator and let Peter take the fall. I begged him to turn himself it; it was self-defense. But he refused and he ran. You don’t want to know what happened afterwards.”  
  
Ned did, but he didn’t ask. Maybe someday, he might get the whole story.  
  
“Anyway – you wanted to know how I felt? Relieved, yes – but confused and lost, too. I thought I finally knew who my father was. Even a terrible truth is better than ignorance.”  
  
“Yes.” That simple concept was something Ned had tried to get across for over three decades. “But most people seem to prefer the bliss of ignorance.” Ned met Neal’s gaze. “And you want to know the truth about your father? You want to know the type of man that Felix was?” Ned pressed his palms against the table. Not as a gesture of emphasis, but to keep from betraying how much this meant to him.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“There’s just one thing I need to know before I’ll answer you. – why are you so positive that he is your father?”  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
This was going better than he’d expected. He might just get away without having to explain his felonious past. Yes, he had called Ned Weeks an asshole, but Neal was positive he wasn’t the first one – this week – to do so. Ned was pretty much as Neal had expected. Perpetually angry, despite his age and his ill health.  
  
But he was also a man who had loved someone very deeply and barely survived that loss. And Neal understood loss.  
  
When Ned was making the tea, Neal had retrieved the bag he’d brought with him. He reached into it and pulled out one of the folders he’d packed and checked it before handing the first piece of paper to Ned. “I found this a few months ago.”  
  
Neal had thought long and hard about this moment. How to tell Ned Weeks the truth, Or at least the truth as he understood it. He watched the old man’s face, noting the muscles tightening along the jawline, his eyes narrowing behind his glasses. He didn’t like what he was seeing.  
  
“You went digging through some city hall archives for this?” No, Ned Weeks didn’t like seeing a copy of Felix Turner’s marriage license to Veronica Caffrey.  
  
“No, I found it with my mother’s papers. She died a few months ago.”  
  
“I’m sorry to hear that.”  
  
Neal hadn’t heard such a meaningless expression of sympathy since Alex had offered her condolences over Kate’s murder.  
  
“And this puts a lid on it.” He gave Ned a copy of his birth certificate.  
  
Ned glanced at it before returning it to him. “I wanted Felix to fight for his rights to be a father. I couldn’t understand why he’d just walked away.”  
  
“When was this?”  
  
“Eighty-two.”  
  
“It was too late by then. He’d already signed the papers giving up his parental rights. James Bennett legally adopted me in 1980.”  
  
“And it was too late for Felix anyway. We fought and five minutes later, he showed me a sarcoma on the sole of his foot.”  
  
“I’m sorry.” Neal reached out and touched Ned, trying to give him just a little comfort.  
  
Ned pulled his hand away, rejecting that comfort. “I am, too. Every god-damned, fucking day.”  
  
Neal tried not to smile. Now he understood the invective, it was Ned’s coping mechanism. “Will you tell me about him?”  
  
Ned and shot back aggressively, “What do you want to know?”  
  
“Everything – what was he like as a person? As a human being? What made him tick?”  
  
Ned didn’t respond and Neal wondered if he was asking for too much.  
  
“How about starting at the beginning? How did you meet my father?”  
  
Ned leaned back in his chair and his features softened a little. “It was 1981. I was looking for someone at the New York Times who’d be interested in reporting on ‘gay cancer’. Friends had suggested that I reach out to a guy who wrote for the Style section – I might find some traction there because he was gay, too.”  
  
“My father.”  
  
Ned nodded. “Not that Felix was the least interested in writing about anything gay-related. At work, he was as closeted as my mother’s mink coat in the middle of summer.”  
  
“It seems so strange…”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Being that closeted. Being so unable to be who you really are.” Neal tried not to wince at the hypocrisy of his words. Hadn’t he spent most of his life doing just that, being something other than himself?  
  
“And you can’t tell me that your FBI friend is waving the rainbow flag in the office?” Ned’s question was dripping with acid.  
  
_God, would this man ever stop with the attacks?_ “Actually, one member of Peter’s senior staff is lesbian. She’s never been in the closet. And since the mid-nineties, the FBI has one of the best records on gay rights in the entire Federal government. As to whether Peter has come out to his superiors is none of your damned business. And has nothing to do with Felix Turner.”  
  
“No, it doesn’t. But you have to understand my curiosity.”  
  
“I do. But I’m not here to talk about the history of gay rights in the FBI. I want to know about my father.”  
  
Ned said nothing, and Neal realized that the man didn’t really want to talk about Felix. His memories were private and sharing them, even with his son, was too painful. He couldn’t bring himself to keep badgering an old man who had so little left. “Look, all I really want to know is if Felix was a good man?”  
  
The simplicity of that questioned seemed to startle Ned. “Why do you ask that?”  
  
“Because that’s what’s important to me. I spent the first part of my life trying to live up to the memory of a hero. The next twenty years were spent trying to – ” Neal paused. He couldn’t tell Ned that he’d spent two decades of his life trying to follow in his father’s criminal footsteps. “Live down the memory of what James Bennett wasn’t.”  
  
Ned didn’t seem to catch his hesitation. “Felix was a good man. He wasn’t perfect – he was human, after all. But he was a good man.”  
  
Neal sighed. He wanted more than this, but if it was all he was going to get …  
  
“He taught me how to love.”  
  
And at that, Neal found what he’d been searching for.  
  
Ned opened his mouth, trying to say more, but no words came. His fists were clenched and Neal could see him struggling not to cry.  
  
“That’s all I needed to know. Thank you.”  
  
Ned looked at him, disbelief chasing away some of the grief. “Really? That’s it? That’s all you came for?”  
  
Neal didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead, he reached into the bag and pulled out the envelope with the photographs. “You might want to see these.”  
  
Ned seemed hesitant. “What’s in there?”  
  
“Photographs. From my mother’s stuff.”  
  
Ned grabbed the envelope from him. “I guess you’d like me to share, too.”  
  
“Would you mind?”  
  
“The blue box, over there –” Ned waved a hand towards a bookcase near an easy chair. “The best pictures are in there.” Neal retrieved the box, feeling too much like Pandora.  
  
Despite his eagerness, Ned still hadn’t opened the envelope and Neal waited patiently for him to go first.  
  
“Aren’t you going to look?”  
  
“Aren’t you?”  
  
Ned snorted in amusement. “Shall we go on three?”  
  


  
  
  
Neal didn’t bother to wait. He opened the box and found the rest of his father’s life. It was as unnerving an experience as looking through the pictures in the wedding album. Felix looked so much like him, but he wasn’t him. As he looked through the pictures, Neal had a hard time connecting to the man. He was smiling and happy – and most definitely in love with Ned. All of the photos were taken in the summertime, at some beach house and often with Ned in the frame. He wondered who the cameraman was.  
  
“Tommy – Tommy Boatwright.”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“You asked who took the pictures.”  
  
“Oh, sorry – I didn’t realize I’d spoken.”  
  
“That’s okay.” Ned was still holding the envelope.  
  
“You don’t want to look?”  
  
Ned shrugged. “It’s hard – can you understand that?”  
  
“To see evidence of a life lived before you’d met?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Neal put the box of pictures down. “I’m living proof that Felix had a life before you. How does that make you feel?”  
  
Ned pursed his lips and Neal wondered if he wasn’t going to answer. “When I really think about who you are, it hurts like hell. Worse than almost anything. It reminds me that we had so little time together. That someone else had a part of him that I’ll never know.” The old man glared at Neal and, in a defiant gesture, opened the envelope and let the photos slip out.  
  
“Oh, oh …” Ned picked up the one that broke Neal’s heart – the one of Felix holding him, smiling with love and joy and pride at his newborn son. He put it down and picked up one that Neal had taken out of the wedding album, of Felix standing in front of the church doors, by himself. There had been a companion shot of his mother surrounded by her parents – but Felix had no one.  
  
“She was pregnant.” Neal had not intended to tell Ned that.  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“My mother was pregnant when they got married.”  
  
“I didn’t know that. He never told me. We never talked about his past. There was just that one argument and then our lives became something different.”  
  
“She loved him.”  
  
“Why are you telling me this?”  
  
“You should know.” Neal swallowed against the pain. “You should know that someone else loved him. It doesn’t take anything away from what you had, but you should know.”  
  
“She told you?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Then how the hell do you know she loved him? Maybe she trapped him and forced him to marry her?”  
  
“Maybe she did – but that doesn’t mean she didn’t love him.”  
  
Ned shook his head, trying to deny the words.  
  
“I told you I grew up in witness protection. When the Marshals came and took us from D.C. and we relocated to St. Louis, we had to leave almost everything behind. I don’t really remember much – I was about three or four. But I remember my mother saying I could only take a few of my toys. Everything else had to stay.”  
  
“And what does this have to do with anything?”  
  
“My mother took only what mattered to her – and that included a wedding album filled with pictures of a man who’d left her.” Neal picked up one of the pictures and showed Ned the line across the print. “She cut him out of all of the photos in my baby album – but she never threw those pieces away. She kept them. When she went into the nursing home, when she had to leave almost everything behind again, she still took that photo album. He still mattered to her.”  
  
“Do you hate him?”  
  
“No. I understand why he left. He couldn’t stay and live a lie. And I really think he wanted what was best for me.” Neal looked at the picture of his father cradling him in his arms. “I’ve spend much of my life trying to understand where I came from, who I am. I don’t have to do that anymore. I have the answers I need.”  
  


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
  
The more time he spent with Neal Caffrey, the more he had to accept the sad truth. Not only wasn’t he Felix, he wasn’t anything like him. And how could he even think that Neal could be like Felix? He had been an infant when Felix left. He had been raised by someone else, made to think he was someone else’s son. Felix never let himself have the chance to be a father to his son.  
  
A part of Ned, a small and hidden part that hadn’t been completely worn away by life’s cruelties, felt terribly, desperately sorry for Neal Caffrey. The greater part of him, the angry and bitter man who’d lost everything that ever mattered, couldn’t allow that sympathy to flourish.  
  
But both parts of him – the parts that made up the man who was a writer – wanted to know how Neal Caffrey had made his way from St. Louis to New York. How he had ended up involved with an FBI agent. Why he had once led a life where he could joke about blackmail and kidnapping and dodging bullets. “What about you?”  
  
“What about me?”  
  
“Who is Neal Caffrey?”  
  
Something moved across the man’s face. Ned didn’t know if it was fear or shame, but whatever it was, he wasn’t going to let it be.  
  
“I’m an independent art consultant. I do appraisal work, research provenance, authentication. Mostly for private collectors, but I do work for museums too.”  
  
Ned still had his sense of smell, and the bullshit was stinking like it was high noon on a hot day in July. “Interesting career choice. Where did you study?”  
  
“I’m self-taught.”  
  
“Hmm, I’ve always heard that it’s difficult to break into that world unless you’ve got an Ivy League degree, or you’re a Kennedy. I guess I’m wrong.”  
  
“I guess you are.”  
  
“You know, that day in the coffee shop, I overheard your conversation with your Fed friend, Peter. You once worked for the FBI. Somehow, you don’t strike me as a former Federal agent.”  
  
“I wasn’t an agent. I was a consultant for the Bureau.” Neal all but spat out those words.  
  
“Really? I didn’t know that the FBI allowed private consultants to get shot at, kidnapped and blackmailed.” He should have been appalled that Felix’ son was put into such dangerous situations, but the man’s caginess about his past was too interesting to ignore. “So, I guess you met Peter when you were working as a consultant for the FBI?” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his question.  
  
“No, I knew Peter Burke for quite a few years before I started consulting for the FBI.”  
  
Ned couldn’t stop himself; he probably should have let it lie but he couldn’t. “So, how did you meet?”  
  
“Why is it so important to you?”  
  
Ned could see how Neal was struggling to keep a rein on his temper. “Because I need to know what type of man you are. You wanted to know what your father was like, I want to know what Felix’ son is like. Would he have been proud of you?”  
  
The man’s temper didn’t so much as snap, but deflate with an almost audible hiss. “No, he wouldn’t have been proud of me. Not at all. You really want to know how I met Peter Burke? He was the FBI agent assigned to track down a man passing forged bonds at banks around New York. He arrested me almost a decade ago, after chasing me for three years.”  
  
Ned didn’t know what he expected, but this wasn’t it.  
  
Neal continued, his tone weary, resigned. “I didn’t want to tell you – I didn’t want you to know the type of man I was. Peter arrested me, and I was tried and convicted for bond forgery. I spent almost four years in a maximum security prison. You want to know how I ended up ‘consulting’ for the FBI?”  
  
Ned nodded, almost afraid to speak.  
  
“I was stupid. I escaped with three months left on my sentence. Peter found me less than a day later – I was sitting in my girlfriend’s apartment, holding an empty bottle of wine like some damned romantic fool. They tacked on four more years for that boneheaded stunt.”  
  
“Girlfriend?” Ned was appalled.  
  
“Of all the things – _that’s_ what you ask about? I’m bisexual, Ned. And I don’t want to hear your thoughts on that subject, okay?”  
  
Ned took a deep breath. “Okay – okay. So – the FBI?”  
  
“I made a bargain with Peter. Instead of going back to prison, I’d work for him; help him close cases in the White Collar division for the next four years. They put a GPS tracking anklet on me. I finished my sentence about fifteen months ago.”  
  
There was so much that Neal wasn’t telling him. “But wait – you were working for Peter Burke for four years?”  
  
Neal seemed to understand just what he was and wasn’t asking. “And for those years, we were just friends.”  
  
“Really?” Ned had a hard time believing that.  
  
“Yes, really. I had loved Peter for a long time. I loved him, loved his wife, his dog, and everything about him. I loved him enough to want to walk away before I destroyed him. When my sentence was over, just before I was about to leave New York for good, Peter and Elizabeth told me how they felt. That they loved me, too.”  
  
“So, now you’re what? One big happy family?” Ned didn’t bother to hide the derision in his tone.  
  
Now, Neal _was_ angry. “Yes, we are. I would think that you, of all people, could understand that.”  
  
Ned remembered Peter Burke’s words, back in June, when he’d noticed that he’d been wearing a wedding band, but Neal hadn’t. _“There’s a universe of difference between promiscuity and polyamory…”_  
  
“Look, for a long time, I wasn’t a good man. I lied and cheated and stole and I never felt anything but pride at being one of the world’s greatest con artists. And even though that’s behind me now, I’m not like you or Felix. I don’t have causes and I’m not someone who fights battles, but I do help people. When I worked with the FBI, I helped save lives – maybe not millions of people – but one at a time. Peter gave me that, can you understand? He looks at me and sees who I am; he trusts me. Elizabeth – who had no reason to – trusts me. That trumps everything else.”  
  
Ned didn’t know what else to say. He found himself intensely regretting this meeting. Neal Caffrey was not Felix Turner and he never would be. Ned wanted him gone – out of this apartment, out of his life.  
  
“Here.” Neal pulled an envelope from his jacket. “I came into some money recently. I thought maybe you could use it.”  
  
“Me?”  
  
“Actually – your cause. AIDS research, education, support for those who need it.”  
  
“It’s your cause too, it’s everyone’s cause.”  
  
“Spare me, Ned. Please.” Neal seemed just as fed up with him, just as ready to be gone. He took the paper wrapped parcel from his bag and set it on the table, next to the envelope. “I need to go.”  
  
“What’s that?”  
  
“Something I made. Keep it, toss it. I don’t care.” Neal moved past him, into the hallway, and put on his hat and coat. “Thank you for telling me about Felix.”  
  
“I’ll probably be dead soon,” Ned blurted out.  
  
“Should I say Kaddish for you?”  
  
Ned wasn’t sure if the offer to recite the mourner’s prayer was sincere. Neal was a total stranger, and a goy at that. Neal had nothing in common with him; he was nothing like his father, Felix. Why the hell would the man offer to do something so holy for him? In the dim light of the hallway, Ned stared into that familiar, and yet so unfamiliar face and asked, “Would you?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Thank you.” Robbed of his usual eloquence, those were the only words Ned could say. He knew he’d never see Neal Caffrey again.  
  
Neal gave him a small, almost sad smile, and left.  
  
The air in the apartment felt dead, lifeless, empty. He went back into the living room and stared at the parcel Neal had left behind. Half-eager, half-afraid of what he’d find, Ned pulled the string off and unfolded the paper. It was a canvas – a painting. He flipped it over and had to laugh. It was one of Rembrandt’s Jews, but with his face – old and sour and still curious. How the hell had Neal Caffrey managed to capture him so perfectly? He wanted to call him back. To apologize, to explain.  
  
Ned shuffled over to the window and looked down at the street. It was snowing, just light flurries, and he saw Neal walking away. But Neal stopped, waved and crossed the street as a man got out of a parked car. There was just enough light from the streetlamp that Ned could recognize him – it was Peter Burke.  
  
He watched the two men embrace, kiss, and get into the car. A few moments later, it pulled away and disappeared into the night.  
  


FIN

  
  


  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to Wickhouse2005 for her prompt over at [White Collar Hurt/Comfort](http://whitecollarhc.livejournal.com/) community's “Comfest 2014” – “Neal is Felix's son, Ned runs into him at a pride event.” I also must thank my dearest Sinfulslasher for pointing me to this – I might have otherwise missed it. 
> 
> I must also thank the ladies of the WCWU chats who’ve supported and encouraged me along this sometimes difficult journey towards finishing what I thought would be a short, 3000 word story. I am eternally grateful to you, my friends.
> 
> And my deepest thanks go to my artist, Kanarek13, who has created so many incredible illustrations. Not only am I humbled by her talents, I am in awe of her ability to read my mind. Without so much as a word from me, she captured the leitmotif of this story. Thank you!


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